When Game 6 of the World Series was rained out, manager Tony La Russa went to see the movie Moneyball. His impressions? “Good acting,” he said, eliciting laughter from reporters. “I’m serious.”
You may need to have more than a head for numbers to get a job in financethese days.A new survey of chief financial officers finds that most think it’s somewhat or very important to have a sense of humor if you want to fit in with their companies.
Not many of us are 6-foot-3 Harvard graduates who can play at the level of professional basketball. That hasn’t kept career coaches, along with t-shirt, sneaker and other tchotchke-makers, from cashing in on the Jeremy Lin phenomenon at the New York Knicks.
Over the years, I have met a lot of entrepreneurs who have been frustrated by low profits, lack of growth, or the stress of the never-ending demands. Many struggle with all three. While every business is different, there are common denominators. In fact, I believe there are 10. The tricky part is that failing to have a handle on just one of these areas can result in mediocre performance, a stressful existence, or ultimate and intimate failure. That is one reason the failure rate for small businesses is so high (here aresome others).
I hit a big goal of mine – finally – just before 2011 ended. I finished writing the novel I began five or so years ago. When I say finished, however, what I mean is that the very first, very rough draft is complete, ringing in at just under 80,000 words.
Know how that novel got written? One single, small word at a time, with lots of mistakes along the way. I learned what not to do, and through that, I learned what works.
“What time do you want me to start work?” That’s the question a new hire recently asked me. She looked a little startled by my reply.
“I don’t care.”
But it was the truth. I didn’t care—and I never have—what hours are kept by the people who work for me. You could say I’m the opposite of a control freak, in the sense that I have always resisted rules, for myself and for others. Why? Because once you have rules, you have to enforce them—and there’s no more tedious task in life.
In Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch, Shawn Parr at Fast Company makes an extremely seductive argument. Though he doesn’t mention it, this type of analysis goes back to Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Except that Mahan does not fall into this trap of concluding that culture matters more than strategy.
I don’t mean to pick on Parr’s article in particular, but it is representative of a lot of very well-intentioned, feel-good writing about strategy that seems to be appearing these days. Parr’s is one of the more solid ones. Here’s an excerpt.
There are 1,001 reasons why people are late to work. Just bring up the topic of ridiculous reasons to be late and it is sure to stir up an interesting discussion.
Bringing greater energy efficiency to commercial buildings promises to be big business. Pike Research estimates the market will increase to $100 billion by 2017.
In October 2008, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheim commented that “visibility is low and forecasting is challenging,” which seemed to be a polite way of saying “We have absolutely no idea what will happen tomorrow.”
In June 2010, UPS CFO Kurt Kuehn reported that “normally we are very obsessive about building good and accurate plans, but as the recession dragged on we realized that trying to build a forecast was almost a waste of time.”