Defensive Management
Remember learning to drive? Oh, the joy… Steely resolve as you nervously clutched the wheel, the front of the car peeking hesitantly out of the driveway. Hypervigilance on full display as you scanned busy...
Category: Business
The Brake Institute of America
In 1959, Gunemdtha Pids was facing a conundrum: having fled revolution in his Hungarian homeland barely three years earlier, he founded a successful business in Flint, Michigan, manufacturing the brake assemblies essential for automobile...
Manage Like You’re Shipwrecked
There was a time in my career when I’d gnash my teeth and wail silently inside at the injustice of the talent I was given to work with. How come I didn’t have only...
The Cavalry’s not Coming to Save Social
Business leaders often don’t “get” social media. It’s frequently treated as just another marketing channel, a way to push promotions and messages. This is often chalked up to a lack of understanding of the...
The Death of the Worker
Organized labour has been shrinking as a percentage of the workforce in America and Canada for decades, which should come as a surprise to no one: authors have been predicting the death of work since...
Why Facebook Isn’t Going Anywhere
Collective rage against Facebook has become deafening over the last six months. It stands accused of killing everything from our attention span to journalism, to democracy itself. It’s been blamed for helping Russia subvert the...
Will you lose your marketing job to a machine?
Marketing Automation: the Death of Your Gig? Every day, machines are discovering exciting new ways to eliminate jobs through the wonders of automation. The latest robots are able to ship boxes, drive 18-wheelers and kill...
Pooh-Pooh Culture
It’s insidious. It undermines trust, saps initiative and likely already infects your workplace: welcome to pooh-pooh culture. Wikipedia defines “pooh-poohing” as “a fallacy in informal logic that consists of dismissing an argument as being...
You’re a sucker for a good webinar
The invite appears in your inbox. “Join us for a free webinar on <insert tantalizing business trend / skill / software / here>.” You open. You read. You ponder (maybe). You click. Days later your...
The Curse of the Gourmet Mustard
Mustard and the Marginal Economy I have the good fortune of living next to the top food market in the world: Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market. Every Saturday I troll the market for free samples. It’s...
