Archive for September, 2004

Wisdom Of Tom

Wednesday, September 15th, 2004

Consider these Four Cardinal Principals: (1) Time is more important than money. (It is the only truly constrained resource.) (2) You = Your Calendar. (You are What You Spend Your Time On as much as … you are what you eat.) (3) “To-Don’ts” are as important, or more important, than “To-Dos.” (What’s not on the list is perhaps more important than what is.) (4) Your To-Do List must never be more than 4 items long. (Okay, you can have an “errands list” that includes replenishing the stock of toilet paper and such�but the Big Yo Mamma To-Do List must … MUST … never run beyond four.)

For more on this and other wonderfully insightful thoughts on business, hit tompeters.com on a daily basis.

A Lost Nuke?

Tuesday, September 14th, 2004

Does this bother anyone else? This seriously troubles me. How do we loose a thermonuclear bomb? Why wasn’t it found earlier? Why were they using a real nuke for “practice”? Seems a placebo weighted similarly would suffice.

“The report also estimated it would take as long as five years and cost $5 million to $11 million to recover the bomb.”

To me this is money well spent. What if we’d spent $5 million making sure Savanah isn’t vaporized in the next 10 years? What if we’d launched 10 less of these that first night in Baghdad? A thermonuclear bomb sitting on the coast of Georgia just doesn’t make my homeland feel any safer.

“The United States lost 11 nuclear bombs in accidents during the Cold War that were never recovered, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

An estimated 50 nuclear warheads, most of them from the former Soviet Union, still lie on the bottom of the world’s oceans, according to the environmental group Greenpeace.”

Why did we go through Posted in Opinion | 2 Comments »

The Positive Reminder

Thursday, September 9th, 2004

For years, law enforcement and city officials have used negative reinforcement to ensure the safety of citizens everywhere. If you speed, you’ll get a ticket. Not only will you get a ticket, but that will cascade your entire life into all kinds of extra incurred costs. Insurance increases for 3 years, dealing with the justice system, etc. This not only makes you angry, but the incentive to have a respect for the law and its enforcement basically dissappears in the long term. Your driving experience becomes a negative one, pseudo filled with fear and the negativity involved with being pulled over.

Most of us are respectful, intelligent, law abiding citizens. The speeding tickets happen on those bad days, when you are late to a final, late to work, you just aren’t paying attention to the speed limit that day. How do you use a “different” technique to make your people remember how important not speeding is on a certain stretch of road? Screwing them tends to make them remember in the short term, but forget in the long term due to negativity. How do you positively affect a community? A country? How do you make people feel like they are part of a positive movement towards keeping the community safer?

Give them a Thank You Note.

Quote of the Week

Wednesday, September 8th, 2004

Laugh when you can
Apologize when you should
Let go of what you can’t change
Kiss slowly
Love deeply
Take chances
Give everything
Have no regrets
Life’s to short to be anything but happy.

Thanks Jill ;)

Building A Dream

Tuesday, September 7th, 2004

I talk with many of my friends that are navigating the waters of the business world on a daily basis. Some are doing jobs that they love, some are looking into starting their own gig. Seth Godin writes today with some words of wisdom that ring very true in terms of how you define your business. You can’t define a new business or program within your current company on whether you are a little bit better than the competition. You have to completely redefine it. He calls those that try to be just a little bit better living in the “echo chamber”. Read on:

“If you’re defining yourself and your business in terms of your competition, you’re living in the echo chamber. Companies and organizations don’t grow fast at the expense of existing competitors. They grow fast for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with whether your service is 5% better or your product is a little more convenient.

You don’t beat McKinsey with better consulting advice, you don’t raise more money than the United Way by spending it more efficiently, and you don’t sell more widgets with a slightly longer guarantee.”

See sethgodin.com for more on this subject.