From the category archives:
Irony: I’m a business planner, and I have been for 30 years now; but the biggest decisions of my real life have been remarkably unplanned.
I could rewrite my own history backwards to make it all seem like it had been planned, but it wasn’t. Going from hippy to business planner to entrepreneur, I tripped over [...]
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There can be great truth in stories. People have communicated in stories from the very beginning. We use stories to tell about God, family, each other, and business. Stories can be true or false by the message they carry, not just what happens in the story. Fables, parables, short stories … think about how much [...]
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I hope you heard–you could have read it here– of the Palo Alto Software’s Oregon Small Business Boost, earlier this month, where we gave away thousands of units of business plan software to help the Oregon economy and reduce its unemployment problem.
The effort depended on more than 85 locations of chambers of commerce and small [...]
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Thanks for asking. Our Oregon Small Business Boost day (business plan software free for Oregonians) yesterday went even better than expected. I like this summary from our local newspaper, which tagged it as “frenzy” on its front page this morning.
And you can click here for our summary of it.
We distributed 16,200 cards through 85 locations. [...]
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During in the recession of 2001, I let 5 people go in a single day. Our sales were down, but we held on, for too long, hoping things would turn up in time to save the jobs. They didn’t.
Letting people go is the hardest thing a small business owner does.
But from that hard time I discovered [...]
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Wow, this is fun. ‘CSI’ Writer Sued For Revenge Naming Show Characters After Real People, which I saw on Huffington Post.
How ironic is this:
LOS ANGELES — A couple sued a writer for the CBS show ‘CSI,’ claiming two shady characters on the show were named after them in revenge for a real estate deal gone [...]
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I’ve posted before on this blog about The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s powerful book, written before the big downturn, which some say (he wouldn’t) predicted it.
With a beautifully written mix of history, stories, studies, and logic, Taleb shows how the big events are completely unpredictable. And that we kid ourselves, [...]
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Are you in the business of teaching? Or guiding, or coaching, or consulting? About 40 years ago a guy named Jack taught me his job in a sugar processing plant. He ran two enormous liquid vats that used acid and…
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