Sporting events have become sensory overload zones. The NFL has cheerleaders. The NBA has cheerleaders too, and mascots who do wacky slam dunks. Major League Baseball has sausage throws (don't ask) and trivia questions and "walk up" songs. The last is the music each...
Wrapped in the Chick-fil-A controversy is a warning to small business owners. It's not about free speech (you can say whatever you want). Nor is it about the wisdom of a dose of self-censorship (just because you can say it doesn't mean you should). And I'm certainly...
I was watching Shark Tank the other night when entrepreneur and inventor Eric Corti walked in pitching a balloon pump designed to take the air out of an open bottle of wine. He was looking for cash in return for a stake in his business. I’m no oenophile, but I know...
I had a conversation with my mom recently about an apparel retailer that is going out of business. She had attributed their fate to a declining economy. My own take: the clothing was staid--and there's a limited market for boring. The company never took a risk. It...
Have you noticed a trend lately disparaging small businesses (especially solo-owned ones)? It's a bit ironic that the people who are taking chances, thinking creatively, and testing out new products and services are getting slammed for not creating jobs at a time...
For 2012, I've decided that I don't need to reinvent the wheel. Last year, I picked out 3 little words--crayons, velcro, and abandon--to guide my business. The whole point was to keep me focused on moving forward, while giving myself permission to take risks again....
How do you measure success? There's a lot of conversation around business success, what it means, and how to measure it. (And we probably talk even more sometimes about lazy metrics and poor measurement.) I'm not going to talk about measurement at all today. Just...
What do you do when the big boys own all the shelf space? One approach is to build a virtual shelf, one person at a time. That's what Joe Vukson is doing. I met Vukson via Twitter earlier this year after I saw a press release about a new runner ID product. I tweeted...
Write a book. Call it a manifesto. Give people a choice between Wonder Bread and funkiness. And then, when you get to the end, tell your readers that you've both wasted your time if you think you've got it figured out. Seth Godin is a brilliant marketer. We Are All...
I recently reviewed Beyond Performance. It's an interesting book in which co-authors Scott Keller and Colin Price argue that: “Performance-focused leaders invest heavily in those things that enable targets to be met quarter by quarter, year by year. What they tend to...