The Twitterverse was all atwitter a few years ago over the idea that one consultant was charging a day rate of $22,000. I had no problem with it. I thought about this the other day following a conversation with a colleague about billing strategies and hourly rates,...
You can't tell the story if you don't know what the story is. Too often, companies talk about themselves without having a clear idea who they are or where they want to go. Let alone what anyone else thinks about them. You have to ask the right questions. I had the...
Heard the phrase "reading is dead" lately? Yup. Me too. Now I recognize the irony of writing a blog post about whether you're going to read ... this blog post. But what's my alternative? I was at a meeting the other day in which a couple of people talked about how no...
Last week's #bufferchat was all about community. Specifically, chat participants talked about what it means to be a community, what makes a community strong, how to pick a platform, and how to get started. One of the questions dealt specifically with advice for...
My university was all about theory. Philosophy, political thought, literary criticism, dinosaurs and meteors. I even read Derrida. My brain was filled with ideas, but I couldn't do anything. Or so I thought. There's wisdom in theory. Of course, I quickly discovered...
If you own or run a business, pay attention to how Saudi Arabia is handling falling oil prices. They're doing nothing, and it's brilliant. Saudi Arabia's break-even point for a barrel of oil is somewhere around $20. Meanwhile, the price to extract that same gallon of...
Getting paid matters. Employee. CEO. Consultant. Entrepreneur. Vendor. Subcontractor. Add your title here. However you're classified, it's nice to see the pay check, consulting fee, sales transaction, and so forth, come through. A client called me on Friday and her...
There's a thought-provoking article on failure in The Washington Post. Geoff Lewis, a venture capitalist, writes: The understated acceptance of failure that propelled Silicon Valley for decades has morphed into something dangerous: failure porn. “Failure” as fast...
The Washington Post has a new Kindle app, and the design is gorgeous. It's clean. It's visual. It's readable. And it's digital mobile. By which I mean that, unlike The Washington Post's "classic" Kindle app, it isn't trying to mimic the look and layout of the Web...
It’s a right-handed world, and some days I just muddle through it. While lots of tools are “ambi-neutral,” many others are not. Scissors are definitively in the not column. But so too are many can openers, ice cream scoops, and other everyday household items. Even my...