A Businessman's View

"When I was a young warthog..." - Poombah, The Lion King I may not be young, but my wife would argue that I'm still a warthog. Meh. When I was young, however (7th grade), I can recall seeing my first computer: a Tandy Radio Shack, Z-80 (where the TRS-80 moniker originated) based PC with 4K of RAM and a cassette tape used for DASD. The local Tandy Sales Representative had dropped by my class (just before lunch) and showed us a simple program that was something like this: 10 PRINT "Hello world "; 20 GOTO 10 As I watched "Hello world" scroll across the screen at the speed of light, I was enamored. I just had to be a part of this phenomenon. Of course, being spoiled by TV shows like Lost in Space (funny, huh?) I figured computer programming was a cinch. So I, as a huge video games buff and a big fan of Space Invaders specifically, attempted the following during the last 15 minutes of lunch before they took the computer away. 10 Create 5 rows of al...

Is any decision ever an easy one to make? I suppose that some decisions are, but it truly depends on the topic of discussion. For example, when my wife and I recently decided to go to Ruth Cris for Valentine's Day dinner, neither of us spent more than 0.13259876 seconds to come up with a collective "yes" on the matter. Other decisions, especially business ones, are not so easy. Rarely does a manager have the luxury of deciding something that does not have ramifications beyond the five minutes immediately following the decision (save for where to go for lunch perhaps). Instead, they are frequently called upon to determine the direction that their ship will travel for the next week, month, or even year. Consider the decision of hiring someone. Susan Docherty who leads the sales, service and marketing for GM's U.S. operations recently described her philosophy around the hiring process in an interview by the New York Times. There's no need to discuss it in de...

Occasionally, I'm reminded of how things could have turned out. ("I cudda been a contendah!") If you know me in real life then you know that, while I'm not against taking risks, they are always calculated to the n th degree and weighed against the effort required to achieve whatever goal I am thinking about. And so I dream up a lot of ideas for products or services (some good and some not), realize that I would prefer to relax during my off-time, and then shelve the ideas. Inevitably, at some point soon after shelving an idea I look at the entrepreneurs of the world or even some homegrown ones and wonder how they ended up being multi-millionaires when I am not. I even asked one how it happened. He said to me (paraphrased), "it's easy to take risks if you have nothing to lose." I suppose the problem is that I've always been mildly successful so I've never felt the need to reach for the proverbial brass ring. Should I have? You be the judge:...

Christmas has come and gone, and every year the wife and I have the same debate: I like to buy things that she doesn't know about so that I can watch the smile on her face when she gets something that she wanted but didn't expect to get; she likes to buy things that I have told her that I want so that she doesn't get me something I don't want. What happens instead is that I don't tell her what I want and she tells me what she wants. I am the one with the surprise because she always gets me neat stuff, and she's the one who is happy because she knows she is getting the things she wants. This Christmas, I learned that sometimes people don't know what they want until you give it to them. For example, this year my wife got me an ear and nose hair trimmer. My OCD has always driven me to spend lots of time in the bathroom several times daily "manscaping" because I get real satisfaction out of cleaning up my appearance. (Of course, the only way to me...