Thu 14 Feb 2008
My goal when I started this blog almost a year ago was to:
On the second goal, I feel like I’ve fallen short. There’s not enough dialogue. (more…)
Thu 7 Feb 2008
Howard Perlstein, founder of HOW, a management consulting services company based in Brookline, Massachusetts, just became my 1000th connection on LinkedIn. We were introduced by a mutual friend and met for coffee. He talked about his business, and I talked about mine. We also talked about ways that we might be able to help each other. I have no idea, yet, whether I or he will reap any financial reward, but, as I said to Howard, if you don’t take the occasional random walk, you’ll wear out your path.
Someone asked me recently, if I actually know all of the people in my LinkedIn network. The answer is “yes.” And I wish that I had started using LinkedIn sooner, because I’m missing the other 5000 people I’ve met during the past 10 years. OK, 5000 is a guess, but I’m not far off. And somewhere in those 5000 is someone I can help. Sometimes for fun and sometimes for profit. And while I can’t help everyone, as a good friend, Barba Hickman, founder of Applied Clarity, said to me, “If I start off each day thinking about how I can help someone, the business pretty much takes care of itself.”
Thu 29 Mar 2007
I’ve always been one to appreciate the support of an IT department. Notice, I didn’t say “a good IT department.” I mean any IT department. No matter how underfunded the department, I can pretty much guarantee that an IT department will do a better job of satisfying my information-access, communication and collaboration needs than I can do on my own. They build, install, and support a variety of email, customer relationship management, accounting, and collaboration tools that make sure that I can do my job better. Since striking out on my own, however, I am, from an applications perspective, pretty much on my own.