Death by Dashboard

Two years ago, I had all the operations in my business put together dashboards — metrics on many aspects of our business (from sales calls to retention) — that could help us understand what was working and not working before we saw the results in our P&Ls. Since then, the dashboards have been extremely helpful [...]

The Last Cry of the Airport Loudspeaker

I’ve been on a couple of conference calls this week both from airports and with individuals who are in airports.  Given this age of constant travel, I suppose that’s not too unusual.  What also is not unusual is the intrusive drone of the airport loudspeaker into those conference calls. Outside of the times when a [...]

Pancake People

There’s a lot of buzz around social media these days and, of course, the Internet has become the de-facto platform for communication and commerce.   We have the ability to connect and interact in ways never thought possible. Customers have become Fans and the Fans can determine quickly whether your product or service wins or losses.  [...]

Give the Ability to Receive this Year

This is the gift-giving season.  And, as we know, it is better to give than to receive.  If you’re like me, you’ve bought and exchanged gifts (and perhaps had some of those gifts exchanged at the store afterwards) and, maybe, even now Aunt Minnie is wearing one of the sweaters you bought her and nephew [...]

Surface Area

I’m on a green tea kick and this weekend I was researching tea pots, specifically one called a Yixing tea pot.  The Yixing is a clay pot and, according to the description, because it is clay, it is porous, which means that the surface area is many times larger than a traditional teapot.  This provides, [...]

Hisses and Pops

Two years ago, for reasons I won’t go into here, I bought a turntable.  It was quite accidental,  but now I find myself scouring e-bay and other sources for records.  My wife thinks I’m crazy (or it’s another reason for her to think I’m crazy) but I now am totally into vinyl.  Some say the [...]