Archive

Have you in the past said to yourself that you’ll never make a New Year’s resolution again, and then gone on to do exactly that? If you, like most people, made resolutions and promptly broke them or did not follow up on them, what did you learn from the exercise? One piece of learning you might gain from it is to be very careful and realistic about promises you make to yourself, especially ones that you have not thought through properly. The cycle of making a promise and breaking it tends to weaken your self-respect. You will begin to feel that you will never be able to achieve what you want to do, and this fact will eventually begin to torment you. So, before you blindly make a ...

One thing that has struck me about Gen X and the 20-30 year olds is their expectations around decision making. As students graduate from school and start work in the “real” world, they find themselves working in teams. And in those teams, very often, particularly in the corporate world, confusion reigns around decision making.  In places like the US, people assume that since they live in a democracy, each person needs to have one vote even at their place of work. The reality of the situation is that commercial organizations are not democratic in nature—they are entities that have shareholders and officers who make the decisions. So if I was in my twenties or thirties I...

With financial bailouts, we are setting a precedent that could have huge unintended consequences. An example is the chip industry, which had been notorious for its ebbs and flows of massive amounts of capital and the price wars that emerged between a whole bunch of companies. That massive building and rebuilding of the industry created a technology boom that we all benefited from and is now going through its own form of bailout as the governments of countries like Taiwan and China are now protecting the chip industry by allowing it to continue. So while most economists talk about the downturn of the 1930s being exaggerated because of the trade barriers that nations put up, are we creating un...

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2008 is bailout. Although not new to the English language, the word has taken on a whole new meaning in light of the current financial scenario, and set me to thinking about the current trend of bailouts (formally called the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP) in the US since the fall of 2008. It started as a relief measure for banks and financial institutions in trouble with mortgages, then was extended to the auto industry and now the real estate industry is also in the line asking for a bailout from the government. The US needs to be a little careful here as we are truly being fairly hypocritical—preaching to the world about the free m...

As times are getting tougher, people are wondering about what the future holds and what they can do to protect their jobs, and how to do their jobs the best they can. One of the things I’ve learned, especially in the commercial sector, is the need for understanding the numbers that are important for your job. What is the performance index—is it the number of clients you serve, is it the renewal rate of the clients you serve, is it the revenue that you’re servicing? Whatever the number is, you need to maximize it. If your job does not have that number, then work very hard to create one number or two or three that you can use as a guide post or as a goal around which you perf...