Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth, by David Thomson (book, Kindle) sounds more formulaic than it is. It’s not a bad book, but you have to dig a little bit for the non-obvious nuggets (yes, I get that growing your company to $1B in sales requires having a great value proposition in a high growth market!). The author looked for commonalities among the 387 American companies that have gone public since 1980 with less than $1B in revenues when they went public and had more than $1B in revenue (and were still in existence) at the time of the book’s writing in 2005. Thompson classifies the blueprint into…
Archives / May, 2010
Call Me
Call Me A fine song by Blondie from 1980 and from the soundtrack of the movie American Gigolo. And also something that reminded me about the importance of not relying too much on email this past month. I had surgery on my left wrist in early March to hopefully fix a nagging tendonitis problem. And while I could still write and type post-op, I got sore pretty quickly every day, so I tried to keep those activities to a minimum. As you might imaging, I do an awful lot of email and IM in my line of work. So what was my short response to a huge number of emails and IMs for a few weeks? “Call me.” My communications,…
Yiddish for Business
Yiddish for Business Contrary to popular belief, Yiddish isn’t “Jewish slang” (I hear that a lot). According to Wikipedia, Yiddish is a basically a High Germanic language with Hebrew influence of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages. It is written in the Hebrew alphabet. I don’t speak Yiddish. Like many American Jews whose families came to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, my grandparents spoke it somewhat, or at least had a ton of phrases they wove into everyday speech. Presumably their parents spoke it fluently before coming here and Americanizing their families. My own parents…
New People Electrify the Organization
New People Electrify the Organization We had a good year in 2009, but it was tough. Whose wasn’t? Sales were harder to come by, more existing customers left or asked for price relief than usual, and bills were hard to collect. Worse than that, internally a lot of people were in a funk all year. Someone on our team started calling it “corporate ennui.” Even though our business was strong overall and we didn’t do any layoffs or salary cuts, I think people had a hard time looking around them, seeing friends and relatives losing their jobs en masse, and feeling happy and secure. And as a company, we were doing well and growing the top line, but we…