Archive for July, 2008

The 10-minute $2 “business” meal

A sound criterion for busy meals is: fast and few steps, few courses, inexpensive (consistently sensible), and few but complete and healthy components. Components are not the same thing as ingredients, mind you, and steps done simultaneously, I count as one. Among them, is this favorite:
Follow the directions for a bag of steam-in-the-microwave frozen mixed […]

Friends are not Food

Never sell your friends, despite what the network marketers say. For one thing, if they’re smart, they know you’re doing it and, either way, it shows a lack of respect. Likewise don’t feed the perpetual salesman, by affecting that bewildered sheep nod that they like so well. Let your body language indicate that you’re not […]

Don’t stand in the Sucker Circle

Try hard not to defend yourself when you’re falsely accused. It happens a little more than now and then, or it wouldn’t have merited a commandment. But put yourself in a position, more often than not, tangibly and emotionally, of having little to lose from it. As a general rule, if people can take something […]

The Dangers of Perception

“Perception is reality”, is a prevalent claim in business. It’s akin to “the customer is always right” or “I give it 110%”. Everyone knows it’s a bogus claim. Even the true believers - “No, that’s really true! That’s the truth! You’re just misunderstanding it!” - don’t live that way consistently. After all, I perceive them […]

Making the Jump to Mazda

Well, I made a decision. It may not be the best decision (I still have mixed feelings), but it’s certainly a decision, and that, at least, pleases me. I traded in my completely debt-free 2003 Dodge Durango (SUV on a truck body), and bought a Mazda3 on credit (with a smidgen of equity).

Previously, I had […]

47 Lawnmowers

Office environments can spawn an odd kind of possessiveness. “Why did you throw that away in my trashcan, not yours?” (One was closer than another). “Those are my paperclips. Why don’t you get your own?” (They all come from the same place). You could attribute it to the personalization of space, but I personalize and […]

Calendar Spam

Meetings are the calendar spam of organizational life. People create and distribute them, pulling in others and, like viruses, they distract, disable, or cripple the flow of work. Just as with e-mail, there are good meeting requests and good meetings, so we tend to be hopeful about all the ones we get handed, but so […]

Paperwork: Triage or Bulldozer

Sometimes, you just have to clear your desk. Pile it all up in one stack and go through it - even if the result is more stacks. Throw away, scan, or file anything that doesn’t need to be in your way. If for no other reason that the psychological benefit, periodically, you need a pristine […]

Pounding out the List

What to do when you’re swamped and engaged in avoidance behaviors:

Realize you’re depressed about it.
Decide that you’re not going to let an “it” determine your emotions.
Organize all tasks into general categories. (e.g. Charity, Marketing, Health)
Prioritize the categories according to your values. (e.g. The poor and suffering first. Then your clients. Then things that affect your […]

The Rules of Safe Driving

There were four friends, one of whom died in a car accident. The other three (let’s call them Jim, John, and Bob) decided to take a road trip in his memory, but vowed to be safe drivers from then on out. Jim sat behind the wheel of the car for a while, but wouldn’t drive. […]

Philosophy in between Meetings

In the course of work one will eventually run into the enthusiastic semi-intellectual. It might be the vocal ideologue, telling you how everything is supposed to fit together, or it could be the lazy skeptic, who takes the position that anything outside the realm of his experience, knowledge, or specialization, is silly.
There’s always someone who […]

Being a Finder

To hate a part of yourself is to hate yourself, and I know no blacker feeling. …We were business people …We made our living… from the things that made our old lives Hell. - Finder, Emma Bull
Rule: Find the unavoidable, unacceptable of you; then try to get paid for it.

Perfect Exercise for Intense People

This is it. HIIT! High Intensity Interval Training. It’s going to be my new best friend. I’ve been hitting the gym, but what I’ve been doing is just not for the impatient. If you’re a decisive, bottom line, goal-driven, task intensive, and even impulsive kind of person, HIIT is it! Seriously - this is the […]

What if it’s not that easy?

With regard to the future, people seem willing to accept one of two basic extremes: the status quo - that things will be as they have been - or the end of the world. What seems harder to accept, indeed a less popular, socially heretical idea, is that we will endure suffering, hardship, and chaos, […]

I Know How

Never market your own services by saying “I’ve been trained to…”. It makes you sound like a terrier. It might be a simple mistake, but it could also mean that you still are thinking of your work as a job. What will a client be more interested in - someone who makes his success relying […]

Cultivating the Capacity to Adapt

Among the many reasons I’m interested in the adaptive capacity of entrepreneurship is simply the interconnectedness and capacity for change in global events. Sure, it’s always been that way. But this is amplified by an era of globalized economies, immigration, and militant foreign policies.
This chart could be looked at a variety of ways. You could […]