Business Insight Zone

I’m doing a fair bit of traveling over the next couple of weeks, which means:

1. Any comments that land in the moderating queue (typically because you’ve never commented here before) may take longer than usual to process.
2. I probably won’t be replying to your comments as quickly as usual.

Please let this not deter you from rampant, trenchant commenting!

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Photo by Robert S. Donovan, used under a Creative Commons license.

Lately I’ve been trying to use the Pareto principle to carve down my work — i.e. to focus my efforts on the 20% of inputs that yield 80% of outputs.

At the moment, I’m staring at a loooooong list of potential blog topics that I’ve been accruing over the past several months. Rather than torture myself trying to write them all, I thought I’d put 15 of the also-ran topics here. Feel free to use them yourself — or to try to convince me that I should put them back on my list. ;)

1. How you can apply the principles of change management to your own working habits and career.
2. Using TweepSearch for prospecting and competitive intelligence. (It would build off of this.)
3. How companies can use the quest for energy efficiency to build better management habits.
4. How I find and use blog images.
5. When hubris runs afoul of the credit markets (with examples like this).
6. How to read a 10-K.
7. The paradox of openness vs. seclusion in business management.
8. Weekly state-of-the-economy analyses.
9. Moving yourself and your team into Covey’s Quadrant II. (It would follow up on this.)
10. New generations of semiconductor technology. This was my favorite beat in our Editorial department — it’s handled expertly now by Jeff Dorsch — and I wish I could keep up with it like I once did.
11. Reviews for several books on my shelf that I’ll probably never get to.
12. China’s solar-power industry.
13. More on stress in the workplace.
14. What neuroscience suggests about business management.
15. Deep-dish media history.

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Photo by Lauren, used under a Creative Commons license.

On Sunday I asked “Who’s the best CEO in America?” Although a number of folks weighed in on my question via Twitter, “only” two readers left comments on the post. (Don’t get me wrong: every comment is like manna to me.)

Yet Wally Bock, whom I met recently through Twitter and whose blog I’ve enjoyed reading, took the time to tangle not just with my own (intentionally simplistic) question, but with various issues raised by the Atlantic Monthly article I cited in the post. That culminated in an extra-long, detailed comment from Wally about modern corporate leadership, which could be a good blog post in its own right.

So, two morals to this story:

1. Wally Bock is someone worth listening to on business leadership;
2. I love blogging because, for all that I work to educate and inform with my posts, I always end up learning more than that from my readers.

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More than a thousand posts into its run, this blog has built an eclectic audience of people coming at business problems from different angles. For as long as I write it, it will probably always reflect my own interests and worldview — but I also want to make sure that it’s doing you a service every day.

So, the floor is open:

How can this blog be of more use to you?

I hope you’ll knock me out with your comments.

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Photo by Joe Loong, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Here are the top five posts, ranked by page views, published on this blog in May.

1. Twitter follow-backs: the 5-step lightning approach.
2. The three-part litmus test, for social media and everything else.
3. Using social media for competitive intelligence.
4. Your brain hates Twitter.
5. There IS such a thing as a dumb question.

(I note a distinct social-media lean . . .)

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Image by woodley wonderworks, used under a Creative Commons license.

People in my line of work could quote Seth Godin all day every day. But that would be lazy, and the essence of Seth’s work is to be industrious. In this case, though, he’s worth a quote — and then some:

You’re nuts if you believe me

. . . My job is provoke you into asking hard questions. Ask those questions to your boss and your co-workers and yourself. It’s easy to show that self-aware decisions and thoughtful strategies outperform blind stumbling. . . .

Everything he says there, I intend here. My job is to ask you some tough questions and suggest some possible answers . . . then get out of your way so you can do the hard part.

Here are the top five posts, ranked by page views, that appeared on this blog in April.

1. Silicon Valley, the IPO drought, and the culture of innovation.
2. Needed: EVPs of Common Sense.
3. My definition for Clutter.
4. The Sun-Oracle puzzler.
5. I just wanted to buy a stamp.

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Image by woodley wonderworks, used under Creative Commons license.

Over the next two weeks, I’m gone more than I’m home, and I’ll barely be in the office. Many topics to discuss, not much time to discuss them. Therefore, expect an explosion of timeboxing, ergo short posts.

Possibly this is a useful moment to reflect on how timeboxing, lightning-round task finishing, and a general awareness that life is short can drive better business/life performance every day.

Eh?

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Photo by John Manoogian III, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

. . . are now available to subscribers of the San Antonio Business Journal at this link.

The short version, for non-subscribers or those in a hurry: not as bad as the U.S. economy in general, and not nearly as bad as it could be for Texas.

If I understand correctly, the story will be free for anyone to read next month — I’ll try to remember to tell you when that happens.

Many thanks to Donna Tuttle of the SABJ — whom I met at the San Antonio Social Media Breakfast in January — for giving me the opportunity to write the column.

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Postcard image of Fort Worth’s Farmer’s and Merchant’s National Bank by Janice Waltzer, used under a Creative Commons license.

Sometimes I get requests to comment on matters of political economy, like what course of action the White House, the Fed, et al. should take. I have a shorter answer and a longer answer.

The short version: It’s a business blog . . . there are plenty of politics / policy / political economy blogs out there already . . . D&B and Hoover’s don’t take political stances on any question . . . and I’m not qualified to comment on much of this stuff, anyway.

The longer version comes in parts:

• What do I know? Probably I know more about policy than some, because I’ve spent the past several years working part-time on a Ph.D. in U.S. history, with an emphasis in foreign-relations history since World War II. So I know a couple of things. But I’m no economist, and while I do try to make sense of the implications of current doings in policy as they apply to the business word, all too often the news out of Washington (and Whitehall etc.) is more about political rhetoric and ideological positioning than it is about what actually matters in your life and mine. This makes it hard to know what to think on many of these issues.
• It’s not information that’s useful to most businesspeople in the course of doing their everyday jobs. It’s often hard for me to see how having a highly informed, devoutly held opinion on, say, agricultural trade between the United States and Latin America, or the role of labor unions in the U.S. auto industry, matters to your working life or mine. Unless, that is, you happen to have a vested interest in one of those topics, in which case (a) you’re likely better informed about it than I am, and (b) you likely have access to specialized sources of information and analysis on it that are certainly better informed than I am.
• Free speech is a great concept, devoutly to be defended . . . but noise isn’t helpful. Hoover’s tries to cut down the noise by offering you the information you need on a company you want to do business with, or an industry you’d like to explore. I talk about that sort of thing, and about business problems that I take to be more or less universal — inbox trouble, busy-ness overload, how the media reports company news, where social media is taking us, how we can use our brains better to work better, and so on. These are things that might be helpful to you whether you’re conservative, liberal, anarchist, libertarian, Marxist, Martian, or whatever. Offering my two cents’ worth on whether President Obama should or shouldn’t be condemned for pursuing Policy X . . . what business problem does that solve?
• Your attention (and ire) would be better invested elsewhere. Walking around angry is a poor way to get ahead in life, and a crazy way to do business. Yet a lot of the political conversations I encounter online are pointless — unless the point is to convince the combatants that the folks on the other side indeed are demented, wilfully blind, and the Sworn Enemies of All That Is Good. Even the discussions that avoid the blame and the name-calling . . . how is having a strong view on TARP going to help you make your next sales call, or code the next feature of your app, or answer a customer’s burning question? There are better uses of your time.

My plate is full enough — with both blog topics and other duties — that I could avoid loaded questions of political economy forever and still have enough to talk about. So I do avoid them.

And there you have it.

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Photo by MonsieurLui, used under a CC-Share Alike license.