I’ve done 9. I guess I have had a pretty much adventurous business life….

The only thing I’ve done is drive a company car…. Well, since I own my business, I drive a company car, but then, that’s still out of my pocket. The note says driving a company car, where you don’t have to shell out your own money, has its own satisfaction….

10 Business and Money Things To Do Before You Die | Business Pundit

Dave Freeman, co-author of the bestselling travel book 100 Things To Do Before You Die, just died in a freak accident in his own home. He was 47 years old. Nonetheless, reports say he lived his life to the fullest, traveling to exotic locales when he wasn’t busy with his job as an ad executive.

If you haven’t read the book, do–it’s excellent inspiration for getting off your chair and planning an exciting trip. While you’re at it, consider that business might also fit into your bucket list. Here are 10 business and money things you must do before you die:

Great story, and Joel has always been a very keen observer of tech and management.

The thing is - not everything that works on another situation will work on your situation.

That’s why management talent is so rare — and valuable.

Because everything depends on the situation.

How Hard Could It Be?: How I Learned to Love Middle Managers — Fog Creek Software — Small Business Advice

A final thought: You have to be careful when it comes to embracing the latest business idea. A single anecdote filtered through the eyes of a journalist about a new cool philosophy for running a company has to be considered in the light of other evidence, such as the way thousands of other companies are set up and operate.

The lesson is, Don’t believe everything you read in a business magazine. Not even this one.

There’s always something you could have done better, or foresee or avoid.

Those are the lessons when you try something new - the most important ting is you evaluate, and see what you learned, so that next time, you will be wiser and make less mistakes….

Jeff Henshaw’s Hog Blog » The year of high- and low-lights at an Internet startup

It has been an amazing year of learning through both successes and failures. Startup life embodies many of the things that I expected, like new levels of autonomy and the responsibility that goes along with it. Decisions made every day impact the viability of the business in ways I hadn’t experienced at larger companies. The demands on me from a startup were very different, including requiring more travel than I’ve ever had to do for business before.

The difficult thing in life is to be successful by making sure you don’t take risks that end up in spectacular failures. I am not sure about yours, but I have foregone spectacular opportunities because I could not bear the downside.

Some people make it big, but the slightest misstep also means that you may fail without ever being able to recover…. and that is not what I think life is about.

Brian Hunter faces charges of market manipulation - Jul. 8, 2008

Hunter is an international man of mystery. We do know that he is young - he was a mere 32 when Amaranth collapsed. We know that he is rich. He made roughly $100 million in 2005, the year before his luck ran out. But we don’t know his view of events or even what he looks like, because Hunter hasn’t talked or allowed anyone to take his picture. He likes to greet reporters who show up looking for him and tell them that Brian Hunter isn’t there.

Just recently, I read that the youngest billionaire on record is 23 year old Mark Zuckerberg, who is the founder of Facebook, now officially the world’s largest social network with over 115 million members. He is worth probably over $5 billion.

I just read also that the youngest person in japan’s richest 40 is Kenji Kasahara, who is 32 years old, and worth about $740 million. He is the founder of Mixi, Japan’s top social networking site, with more than 13 million users.

There must be something about youth, and money created out of social networking right now….

It is undeniable that a great hire will immensely help a company.

His take: it may well worth to work with a potential good candidate upto 4-6 hours to know more about hiring.

ITs expensive? Well, what’s the cost of a wrong hire? It can be a lot of money, and also it will waste you a couple of weeks, if not months.

Tips and Resources to Hire the Best | Small Business Trends

the reward from a great new hire at a small company can be…the entire company, again. A doubling of revenues or customers or cutting costs in half is the impact a good hire can bring quickly to a small company.

In personal or business life, we hit a plateau every now and then.

This is the time during your golf game, or your writings, or even in your business, when you seem to be stuck in no-growth.  No matter what you do, your game or your business is not improving….

That hit Lexmark, and it is hitting Dell.  Then you have to cope, and to adjust, and at the end, you have to admit that you have to grit your teeth and endure, and the only way to keep the business viable is to cut costs.

But it is an important ingredient of success that you endure when you hit a plateau… It is a time when people of lesser determination quits, and for those who don’t quit, they have at least less competitors to contend with.

When the going gets tough, the tough gets going!

Dell to save $3B over 3 years - Yahoo! News

Dell says it will save as much as $3 billion over the next three years as it cuts costs and lays off workers.

The world’s No. 2 computer maker said Monday it will close its desktop manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas.

Dell Inc.
is also reaffirming its plan — announced last year — to cut at least
8,800 jobs, or about 10 percent of its work force. In the last nine
months of fiscal 2008, the Round Rock, Texas-based company cut 3,200 jobs.

Excellent article in businessweek on what it means to have an advantage by being ‘ business-oriented’, and ‘entrepreneurial’.

Knowing how certain things relate to others, and seeing the forest and not get lost in the trees, these are essential skills in whatever industry to move forward.

Techies Need to Know the Business

Technical experts need to be viewed and developed as business professionals early in their careers; at the speed of business today, it’s essential to align every activity to strategy. Increasingly, areas such as information technology and R&D are moving from being cost centers to driving business strategy. Effective leaders in technical areas require an understanding of the business that extends beyond a single department or function.

People who truly “know the business” think strategically and recognize
how everything fits together. This requires seeing things from the
point of view of other departments, understanding how financial data
drive organizations, and having a working knowledge of core functions,
such as the supply chain, marketing, and human resources. Effective
leaders also have a personal presence that enables them to communicate
confidently across departments and to guide and work in teams, while
making smart and ethical decisions.

A joke was said that a small pizza place put a small sign in the wall saying: ” Quality.  Service.  Price.  Pick Any Two“.

It may be humor, but it means something …. It is almost regular that I hear entrepreneurs saying they want to create a business that will succeed because - it will offer quality products at the lowest prices with the best service.

You can’t have it all, and as a business, you have to choose one or two at most.

A great book on business is The Discpline of Market Leaders by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema.  In this book, the authors constantly remind the readers that market leaders by focusing on one discipline- either focus on being operationally efficient, being customer intimate or being technologically superior. 

You can’t be all three….

I do a lot of speaking about business and entrepreneurship, and one of the more often things I am asked is when do you start teaching your kids entrepreneurship?

I have another answer.  It seems that in China, there are now more than 3000 kids from age 3 to 6 that is enrolled in “early” MBA.  Shanghai’s FasTracKids Academy advocates teaching management skills and life-goal training sessions nitead of nursery rhymes or finger painting.

for instance, the kids were purportedly asked to create a business plan to manage a computer-animated sheep farm and told to ask how to make money.

In the race to win, more schools are cramming the kids with ‘more’ lessons.  I just recently went through my kids mathematics.  At age 7, he is now asked to do double figure multiplication, something I myself did not have to go through until age 11.