Last week at the AlexChamber Government Contractors Forum, Monica Bell gave a textbook recipe for how to restart a company in this ugly economy. I read a lot and talk with many people and it was the first time I had heard the way she did it. Her solution had already worked and was somethingRead… Read more »
This morning I read Nat Boxer died (on LinkedIn). He was 84, had won his Oscar, and from what I read, still boogieing on, making the world a better place. I could say he was my favorite college professor, or the only one I remember, or the one I think about a couple of timesRead… Read more »
Last week we competed in the Amateur Rum Internationals in Nassau. Went diving with a couple from England. Chris had been a dairy farmer for over twenty years, then ten years ago he looked at the economics of dairy farming in England and decided there weren’t any. Took his buildings and converted them into “workshops.”Read… Read more »
Last year, Suw Charman-Anderson started Ada Lovelace Day so people could honor their favorite girl geek. She wasn’t going to do it unless she got 1,000 posts. She got almost 2,000. I wrote a short piece about Julie at The Webmanagers Roundtable, and later noticed she was tied with Marissa Mayer, Princess Googly, one all.Read… Read more »
The Web Managers Roundtable is presenting Open Source Content Management Systems: Panacea or Pandora’s Box? A Critical Evaluation of Open Source Content Management & Lessons Learned from WhiteHouse.gov’s Open Source Initiative on April 25th. Event Summary Disclosure – Julie, who runs the WMR has been a protégé for over 15 years, and Tony Byrne, theRead… Read more »
I think we are in a time of discontinuous change. Stands to reason we should be managing for that. My friend Ben, my longest running client, doesn’t make sales…he creates markets. Over the past fifteen years he has done that several times, usually when forced by collapsing employers. He called the other day and said,Read… Read more »
Gary Vaughan is a retired career FSO, now a Sharepoint guru at the Department of State. We are college classmates. At lunch last month we were discussing the way Microsoft and open source tools are being used for similar tasks on the social web.One output was his commitment to increase his blogging frequency.The second wasRead… Read more »
The best way to present new information is a story. The best way to get a listener to focus on your story is to start with a question. Did you ever feel your body lurch to answer when someone asked a good question? In direct mail, a proven start is the “Passover Opening” from “WhyRead… Read more »
In this LinkedIn, Ning, Social Media reality, succeeding at face to face meetings and group meetings are stillvery important. On Dick’s Sales Model, I put “Events/Design,” which most people think means talking from the front of the room. Even though Julie once introduced me as a “loud and frequent speaker,” I get most of myRead… Read more »
Just read a great blog post on “It’s A COBOL World” called “A Customer Visit” by an old friend. “It’s a COBOL World” is about COBOL, the workhorse of business computer processing, and the team of writers on the blog are passionate about getting more out of the code. “A Customer Visit” addressed people’s attitudesRead… Read more »