5 Kinds of Trolls Hiding Under Business Bridges

By Tim Berry

You could call this post the taxonomy of trolls. I thought there were fairy-tale creatures, ugly and mean, living under a bridge, interfering with innocent travelers. It turns out, though, they’re real. Just like in the three billy goats gruff fairy tale, they are hiding along the way, jumping out to cause trouble. I like... Read More »

Planning is Stories

By Tim Berry

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... Read More »

Maybe Writing Isn’t So Obsolete After All

By Tim Berry

Just a few years ago I was mourning the loss of the printed word in our media-hungry and web-hungry society. Even people I really respect, although most of them much younger than I, were starting to show cavalier disregard for the English language. I’d grimace while reading something that mistook then for than, or they’re... Read More »

Marketing Textbook in Top 250 Blog List

By Tim Berry

What if the question was: what’s the best book about marketing to read and recommend? And the answer was: read this compilation: Top 250 Blog Posts – Advertising, Marketing, Media and PR Spotlight Ideas. How things have changed. Not Kotler’s Principles of Marketing, not Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing, not even Jay Conrad Levinson’s Guerilla Marketing.... Read More »

2 Pictures, 200 Words, Lots of Ideas.

By Tim Berry

Pictures, words, ideas. If one picture equals 1,000 words, how many ideas does it generate? Is there a transitive property there? I had time over the weekend to pick up two unrelated pictures. Each covers something entirely different. Both are full of ideas. The first, a chart by Seth Godin: This is one of those... Read More »

Blogging: 10 Things To Do with A Bad Headline

By Tim Berry

I thought it was one of my better posts ever on Huffington, A Great Debate About Ideas, because it covered something really important — the battle of free vs. not — and tied Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, and Ellen Goodman together. But it wasn’t, it turns out, because of a dull deadline. Maybe... Read More »

Dan Schawbel, Me 2.0, and Personal Branding

By Tim Berry

What does personal branding mean to you? To me it used to be about well-known experts whose names became brands in an almost-traditional business sense: Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Tom Peters; they were experts whose names sold books and speaking engagements. Lately my view of personal branding has expanded as I start following John Jantsch,... Read More »

Really Good vs. Pretty Good vs. Adequate

By Tim Berry

One of my favorite quotes,  by Adam Osborne talking about product development, gives way to Seth Godin talking about running your business. Adam was a writer first, and a personal computer industry pioneer later. I met him when he spoke to my class at business school, then followed his nova-star company, Osborne Computers, as it rose... Read More »

What’s This Information Worth to You?

By Tim Berry

In running a business, speaking to groups, teaching a university class, I've learned that often an exact-sounding guess in the right range is more useful than "I'll check on that and get back to you" or "I'm not sure exactly,... Read More »