Business

Thom on February 10th, 2012

I just finished reading this article on Forbes.com about Kathy Ireland’s business empire. It’s interesting stuff. The bottom line is that she combined her name recognition with a talent for design and created a brand that has nothing to do with modeling and everything to do with middle-American motherhood. She plays to her strengths, preferring [...]

Continue reading about Kathy Ireland: “Supermogul”

As a business-owner of sorts I am very interested in new findings in business and leadership. I recently was recently talking to my brother about my company and how we need a guiding vision going forward from our first successful year. He recommended “Great By Choice” as a book he had recently read and thoroughly [...]

Continue reading about Book Review: Great By Choice – Jim Collins & Morten T. Hansen

Thom on January 7th, 2012

I recently spent some time at Forbes.com and found some incisive articles I want to share: The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives - Eric Jackson …In it, he shared some of his research on what over 50 former high-flying companies – like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Rubbermaid, and Schwinn – did to become complete failures.  It [...]

Continue reading about Awesomeness from Forbes.com

Thom on December 29th, 2011

Here’s an interesting case that should get more attention than it is currently getting: An Internet company is suing a former employee, saying he left the firm and took his 17,000 Twitter followers with him. PhoneDog LLC says Noah Kravitz owes them $340,000 because when Kravitz left to do freelance work, he changed his Twitter [...]

Continue reading about Who owns your followers?

Thom on October 7th, 2011

So, what do I think about “Occupy Wall Street” and the copy-cat protests starting up around the country? The same thing I thought about the Tea Party protests originally: I’ll wait and see. While I did attend a Tea Party rally a few years ago, it was probably a good six months after the Tea [...]

Continue reading about Occupied with Occupy Wall Street

Thom on September 17th, 2011

While I usually enjoy reading Instapundit.com, he seems to be unaware of the contradiction on his site. Now I will admit that the Solyndra controversy looks bad, but let’s not make it worse than it is. First we have a link to this article, which claims that the Obama administration reworked the loan to Solyndra [...]

Continue reading about Solyndra – Contradictions and bad business sense

The office where I work has a bookshelf of assorted tech and business books donated by employees for other employees to check out and read. Since I’ve recently read some things about and by Richard Branson I was excited to see this book on the shelf. I immediately checked it out and started reading. The [...]

Continue reading about Book Review: Business Stripped Bare, by Richard Branson

Thom on May 18th, 2011

I’ve likely written about this before, but I can’t stress enough how important it can be to engage in risk management in any size business. Things will go wrong. It’s a given. And while you can’t plan for everything, you can identify the most likely and most critical risks and plan for those. This was [...]

Continue reading about Risk management: The master of plan B

Thom on March 2nd, 2011

My first “grown-up” job was for a company that designed accounting, inventory, and point-of-sale software for tire stores. We worked hard to make a package that gave business owners everything they needed to know how their business was doing. While we could design custom reporting for clients, we ensured our reporting and bookkeeping were complete [...]

Continue reading about Plan for visibility

Thom on February 17th, 2011

I read an article by C. Norman Beckert, district director for SCORE, in the Idaho Statesman’s business magazine Business Insider (I’d link to it, but it’s subscription only), in which he discusses whether or not you need a formal business plan for your business idea. His answer was spot-on: It depends. He feels that unless [...]

Continue reading about Is your business plan “just right?”