Weblogs

Management And the Art of Saying No

August 27, 2012

Do you recognize this tactic? I was at the Apple Latin America headquarters in 1984 for an appointment with Hector Saldana, general manager. I arrived on time for a meeting, Hector came out of his office and welcomed me, walked me to the place to get coffee, and left me in a conference room, promising [...]

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The Vital Fresh Look for Business Survival

July 12, 2012

The artist knows the scene. He lives there. But he closes his eyes, squinting, to get a fresh view of it. Sometimes things get too familiar.  Back in the 1970s when I was a foreign correspondent living in Mexico City, I dealt frequently with an American diplomat who provided information about Mexico’s increasing oil exports, [...]

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Which is Worse: Making a Mistake or Losing an Opportunity?

July 11, 2012

What a great thought: how people approach failure is a key to success. That comes straight from Why Failure Drives Innovation, an article by Baba Shiv, Professor of Marketing, published in the Stanford Graduate School of Business news page. Consider this: “Failure” is a dreaded concept for most business people. But failure can actually be a [...]

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Backroom Backbiting Will Bite You Back

July 10, 2012

There’s a coffee shop in the Portland (OR) airport with the tagline “good coffee … no backtalk.” It’s hard to see in my picture here, but there it is.  What I make of this is a reminder about a fundamental business practice that way too many business owners forget. You can’t, simply can’t, let your [...]

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Be a Fly on the Wall as Wall Street Crumbles

June 20, 2012

I watched Too Big to Fail last night. It’s a 2011 made-for-HBO movie that makes a great drama taken (or so it seems) from actual events. I watched like a fly on the wall as then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen and others dealt with the financial meltdown of 2008. The first reason I liked it [...]

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Some Suggestions for Family Business

May 15, 2012

I’ve done business with my wife, daughter, son-in-law, and various mixtures of those. Of course the classic advice on this is not to mix business with family. But people do. I read somewhere that 62 percent of the gross national product of the Western world is produced by family businesses. Furthermore, I don’t believe (much) in [...]

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The Paradox of Profits

April 27, 2012

We take it for granted. One of the main goals of a business is making a profit. Right? Maybe not. Answer this question: What makes a business more valuable? Is it profits, or growth? Or future prospects? And then this question: Don’t you have a straight trade-off between profits and growth? Assume you have money [...]

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The New JOBS Act, Crowdfunding, and Shoes Waiting to Drop

April 26, 2012

It’s less than three weeks since the new JOBS act opened the door to exciting new crowdfunding initiatives. This could be a sweeping change, an end to antiquated laws requiring startups to get investment mainly from so-called accredited investors. And it could be another deregulation causing a lot more problems than it solves.  For the [...]

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Truth, Magic, Stories, and the Digital Campfire

April 4, 2012

Do yourself a favor and watch Marco Tempest on this brilliant six-minute TED video. If you don’t see it here, use this link to go to the TED site to watch it. After you’re done, I’d like to tell two true stories that seem somehow related. And before the video, I want to highlight some [...]

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Q&A: Valuing a SaaS Business

March 26, 2012

This question was posted on my “ask me” page on my timberry.com site. I can’t promise to answer all the questions I get, but I try, and I’m particularly happy when I get one whose answer might be useful to other people. So here’s a question: Do you have any idea how to value a SaaS [...]

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