Business Insight Zone

More than 500 posts along in the life of this blog, my ideas of what it can achieve are coming together better than ever. With this post, please let me share some of those ideas with you — and solicit your own ideas in return.

Hoover’s covers all sorts of companies — literally, every single sort of legitimate enterprise — and I’ve been given the luxury of a very wide remit by the deeply wise powers-that-be here. (Did I mention that they’re deeply wise, my bosses? O, how I esteem them!)* So in theory I can talk about anything.

If you’ve been reading this blog very long, you’ll know that indeed the conversation has ranged widely across industries, across geographies, across concepts. But the more I sit and think about what value I can bring to your busy day, the more I’m convinced that my real “beat” lies at the intersection of:

• human psychology and
• prevailing commercial modes of operation.

Let me explain: We read all the time about how a deal is going down, about a new policy or piece of legislation, about an executive who’s making waves, about a company or an industry in ascent or decline. And so on. You can be pretty sure that there will be another deal, policy, executive, company, or industry to talk about tomorrow. My mates in the Hoover’s editorial department will make sure that we stay all over that like we always have, and some of them will write up their thoughts on the Bizmology blog (which you’d do well to check out, if you haven’t already).

That’s our stock in trade, and we do it better than anyone else, if I do say so myself. But while Hoover’s as a whole continues to excel at that, what can li’l ol’ me offer as icing on the cake? How about a bigger picture? Something for the longer term? Something that straddles companies and industries and geographies and eras? Something to help you think beyond the here-and-now? That’s what I want to provide.

My belief is that many of the dumb things we see in the business news every day are rooted in basic (or not-so-basic) principles of human thought — the sorts of hangups and blind spots and leanings that affect even the most brilliant among us. Conversely, many of the successes I see come from human beings who remember that business is a human endeavor, and that they should watch out for their own foibles and irrationalities as they make decisions and press ahead in their commercial relations.

In part my focus is an effort to make a virtue of necessity. I love me some nitty-gritty details, and I love my daily swims in the ocean of news and information, but at heart I’m a big-picture thinker, and my fascination for history and for psychology means that I’m forever trying to put the business affairs of today into those larger contexts.

It doesn’t always work — and I’m counting on you to tell me when it doesn’t. Sometimes a simple and direct comment on the latest news is welcome — and I’m counting on you to tell me when it is. But over the long haul, I believe that the best thing I can do for you is to work from my own (unique? oddball?) perspective to suggest ways that current happenings in the business world reflect deeper human realities that will affect the way you do business forever.

This gets all the more interesting because of enormous ongoing trends, including:

• radically increased interconnections across global economies;
• immense geopolitical challenges;
• the threat of broad-scale environmental degradation in our lifetimes; and
• wave upon wave of new tools and media that will continue to unsettle prior arrangements for doing business.

In other words, we have plenty to talk about. I look forward to what comes next in this conversation. And above all, I look forward to learning what only you can teach me.

A-a-and away we go!

~

* I lay it on so thick because I’m a kidder. In all seriousness, this is the best place I’ve ever worked, and for me it just gets better over time.

Category: Hoover's, The working life