Husbandry

This last weekend marked my Meyer Lemon’s annual trip into the house for Winter. Since lemons require a long growing season, I always bring it in just before Thanksgiving laden with lemons while silently praying that none fall off while being GENTLY coaxed through the door, where it will stay until February. Then it’ll go […]

Epiphany: The Marketer and the CIO Should Be Friends

Remember the movie “Working Girl”? I’m remembering the scene where Melanie Griffith’s character Tess tells Trask her train of thought that led to putting two very different companies together. TESS: See this — this is from the Wall Street Journal, just your basic article about how you were trying to expand into broadcasting, right…okay, now […]

The Soul of (All) New Machines

Remember the Tracy Kidder book, “The Soul of the New Machine“? Required reading in business school from almost the day it shipped, the author embedded with teams at Data General in Massachusetts, in their quest to build a new and better mini-computer (remember those?) in those in-between days between big iron mainframes and the eventual […]

There’s no place like home…there’s no place like home…

August 23, 2020 Make no mistake; the COVID-19 pandemic is expensive. In a macroeconomic sense: world economies sputter along in low speed, needing fewer of this and that means fewer people employed, making fewer dollars, and national and world GDP not nearly as robust as before. No doubt the world we go back to will […]

The Long Path

For years as an IT diagnostician, my most sought-after skill was being able to know someone’s mind (and thus their technology needs) well enough to anticipate needs, or at the least being able to translate needs into something I can deliver. Later as an IT Director and V-P, when onboarding beginner Tier 1 tech support […]

Everybody Out of the Pool!

Note: I started this post in late February 2020, before the pandemic lockdown, to remind and describe how companies have “pivoted” (hate that term) in the past due to societal mandates. Now I finally went back, post-surgery, to finish it… See the “Mad Men”-esque image above. Where’s your organization’s secretarial pool? Not long ago (my […]

Happy New Decade!

Yesterday (when I started writing this) was New Year Adam — coined we believe by our friend Brooxie Crews Keary. Because Adam came before Eve, don’cha know. Brooxie used to have “Christmas Adam” parties on the 23rd, and since then the naming tradition has stuck. Brooxie disavows this term, but the preponderance of evidence points […]

Move the Battlefield

Like any good business school student of the 80s/90s, I read all the classic works to explain how to get ahead. I’m sure many of you remember the Gordon Gekko line from the movie Wall Street that in some ways encapsulated the ethos of the era: “Greed is Good.” Many of the book choices of […]