The ox doesn’t get easier. The cook gets better. There’s a great poem called CUTTING UP THE OX. anahatabhakti.wordpress.com/… The cook has become so skilled at cutting up an ox that he hasn’t sharpened his blade in 19 years. He has learned to find the spaces. I think running a business is like that. Practice. More practice. And then still more practice. Business doesn’t get more certain. Employment doesn’t get more certain. Life certainly doesn’t get more certain. You just get better at finding the spaces. I’ve been fired three times. The third time I decided I could keep getting fired, or I could start my own company. That was 35 years ago. The ox hasn’t gotten any easier. But I think I’ve gotten better at cutting it up. jamesnowakowski.com/you-were… #Business #Leadership #Management #Careers #JobSecurity

Everybody wants growth. Until growth requires changing something. Then come the objections. Too risky. Too expensive. Too disruptive. Let's wait until we're certain. The sky is falling. Certain of what? That nothing will go wrong? Good luck with that. Business requires taking risks. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. But doing nothing is a decision too. No pain, no gain. Remain the same. Read my post. interlinegroup.com/mix/no-pa… #Leadership #BusinessGrowth #Strategy #Change

Why does Chaucer's Wife of Bath tell us so much about herself before she tells us her tale? She's certainly not shy. But there's a difference between telling people about yourself and controlling what they think about you. That's one of the questions I explore in my analysis of her Prologue. Sometimes what a narrator chooses to tell us is as interesting as what happens in the story. Read with me. readingwithjimmy.com/blog/wi… #Chaucer #CanterburyTales #ReadingWithJimmy

Don't shoot the messenger. Good advice. Usually. But what happens when the messenger keeps delivering bad information? Or promises something will happen and it doesn't? Or tells you everything is fine when it isn't? At some point, the problem isn't the message. It is the messenger and where that messenger is getting the information being fed to you. It's called reliability. We spend a great deal of time talking about communication in business. Maybe, just maybe we should spend more time talking about whether people can depend on what we're communicating. Or what is being communicated to us. Because once reliability disappears from your communications -- just once -- and every message becomes suspect after that. You actually never recover from something like that. interlinegroup.com/mix/when-… #Leadership #Reliability #Communication #Business

Show Me to the Sales Prevention Office Every company has a sales department. Some have a sales prevention department too. They just don't call it that. You know the people I'm talking about. The ones who explain why you can't sell something to somebody who wants to buy it. Wrong channel. Wrong customer. Wrong territory. Wrong procedure. Meanwhile, the customer is standing there with money. I've always wondered why companies work so hard to generate sales opportunities and then invent reasons not to pursue them. Maybe we should start measuring sales prevention. Do you have an office like that? Read my post. interlinegroup.com/mix/show-… #Sales #Distribution #BusinessDevelopment #Leadership

“Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” Herman Melville ends Bartleby, the Scrivener with those words. But what are we supposed to do with them? Are they an expression of sympathy? Regret? An admission of something the narrator doesn't fully understand? The ending invites us to go back and reconsider everything that came before it. That's what makes reading the classics interesting to me. The ending isn't necessarily where the thinking ends. Read this classic with me or my blog! readingwithjimmy.com/blog/en… #HermanMelville #Bartleby #ReadingWithJimmy

I always used the light bulb test. Each person in a company is a light bulb. Pull their plug and ask what happens. Does the room dim? Get brighter? Stay the same? When you pull a person’s plug and the room gets brighter, don’t put the plug back in. But if it gets dark, how dark? Really dark? Better put the plug back in quickly. There’s a lot of talk right now about layoffs, RIFs, workforce reductions, resource realignment and all the other nice words companies have invented for firing people. But companies should remember something: firing someone doesn’t only change that person’s life. It changes the company. And you better understand what you’re changing before you pull the plug. Check out my post. jamesnowakowski.com/you-were… #Leadership #Management #Layoffs #Business #Workplace

Here's a problem I've had with people who say, "I know it when I see it." What happens when you and I don't see the same thing? I'm color blind. So I learned a long time ago that what I see and what someone else sees aren't necessarily the same thing. And explaining those differences isn't always easy. Now apply that problem to American culture. What is culture? What is civilization? What is common sense? Roger Kimball wrote an essay about restoring American culture that prompted me to ask those questions. He made some provocative arguments, but I kept returning to something that bothered me: he hadn't adequately defined the words on which his arguments depended. And if we don't define our terms, how can we know whether we're even talking about the same things? That's not just a problem in politics. It's a problem in business, education, personal relationships and just about every other human activity. Words matter. Definitions matter. And understanding what someone else means matters even more. Mirror, Mirror…Who's Got American Culture After All? Check out my post. jamesnowakowski.com/mirror-m… #AmericanCulture #Communication #CriticalThinking #Language #Understanding

Everybody tells you to connect the dots. Fine. But what happens when you can't see all of them? I'm red-green color blind. Found that out in college, when a professor showed us one of those pictures with numbers hidden inside colored circles. Everybody saw the number. Except me. That experience taught me something about business. People connect the dots they can see and then assume they've got the whole picture. Sometimes they don't. Which is why I learned to look for patterns instead. Are you sure you're seeing all the dots? Are you ever? I'm glad I'm color blind. interlinegroup.com/mix/the-p… #Leadership #Strategy #DecisionMaking #Business

Ever play pool? Sometimes the straight shot isn't available. So you bank the ball off the cushion to get it where you want it to go. Funny thing is that bank shots work in business too. You want to reach somebody in an organization, but you don't know who that person is. Or you know who they are, but can't get through. So you ask somebody else for help. Not to trick your way in. Not to sell them something they don't need. Just to find the right person who might have the problem you can solve. I wrote about this post about the bank shot years ago, including what happened when we sent a letter to the president of a Fortune 500 company. Two days later, we were talking to the person we needed. Sometimes the indirect route is the most direct route. Ever happen to you? interlinegroup.com/mix/the-p… #BusinessDevelopment #Sales #B2B #Strategy

What makes something frightening? Is it what we see? Or what our minds begin to imagine when we can't explain what we're seeing? Guy de Maupassant knew how to create that uncertainty. In The Hand, he gives us a mystery and invites us to decide how much of it we can really understand. It's a short story worth reading closely. readingwithjimmy.com/the-han… #GuyDeMaupassant #ShortStories #ReadingWithJimmy

I've always had a problem with the parable of the unjust steward in Luke 16. Here's a man who gets fired for mishandling his employer's property. Before he leaves, he reduces the debts owed to his boss so that the debtors will welcome him into their homes when he's unemployed. And then his boss commends him! What? The steward wasn't forgiving his own debts. He was forgiving somebody else's. He was cheating. So why would his boss approve? I thought about this for quite a while. I even asked a priest friend about it. Then I arrived at an interpretation that made the entire parable fall into place for me. The steward was a crook. And so was his boss. Suddenly, Jesus' warning that no man can serve two masters—God and mammon—takes on a different meaning. Here's my interpretation. See what you think. jamesnowakowski.com/the-unju… #Bible #Luke16 #BiblicalInterpretation #Literature #CriticalThinking

How Much Data Can You Eat? Apparently, there's no limit. We collect data. Analyze data. Buy more data. Hire people to interpret the data. And now we have AI to help us consume even more of it. Reminds me of Erysichthon, the fellow in Greek mythology who was cursed with an appetite that could never be satisfied. The more he ate, the hungrier he became. Sound familiar? At what point does having more information stop helping us make better decisions? Perhaps the problem isn't how much data we can consume. It's knowing when we've had enough. Read my blog. interlinegroup.com/mix/much-… #Data #AI #MarketResearch #BusinessStrategy

I read a lot of economic commentary. Wall Street analysts, economists, investment strategists. They have different ways of looking at the economy, and most of them make sense within their own frameworks. But after more than 35 years of running a business, I've come to believe there's something missing from much of their analysis. Friction. Not recession. Not collapse. Not even inflation by itself. Friction. Costs that rise and don't come back down. Customers who become more cautious. Hiring decisions that get harder. Technology that changes how much work one person can accomplish. Margins that seem to be under pressure from somewhere all the time. The economy can be growing while running a business becomes more difficult. So I divided Wall Street's thinking into three groups: the cycle thinkers, the shock-absorber thinkers and the regime-change thinkers. Each sees something important, but none quite captures what the person running a business experiences every day. For that person, survival often comes down to three things. Cash. Tools. Judgment. I explain why in Three Ways Wall Street Thinks About the Economy—and What They Miss. jamesnowakowski.com/three-wa… #Economy #BusinessStrategy #Leadership #SmallBusiness #EconomicOutlook

When you read Dostoevsky in English, whose words are you reading? Dostoevsky's? The translator's? Some combination of the two? Translation is one of those things we tend to take for granted until we realize how much of our understanding depends on somebody else's choices. The words matter. And sometimes the person choosing those words matters just as much. Here's why I think readers should pay attention to the translator. readingwithjimmy.com/blog/wh… #Dostoevsky #LiteraryTranslation #ReadingWithJimmy

I don't think the most important thing about reading the classics is finishing them. I think it's what happens while you're reading. You begin to question a character's decisions. You reconsider what you thought a narrator was telling you. You recognize something about human behavior that you hadn't quite noticed before. That's what keeps me reading. And that's what Reading With Jimmy is about. One minute if you're curious. Ten minutes if you're interested. The whole work if you're hooked. Check it out for yourself. readingwithjimmy.com/blog/wh… #ClassicLiterature #CriticalThinking #ReadingWithJimmy

A client once told me they didn't want to pursue a research project because they wanted to stay in their lane. What does that mean, "staying in your lane?" Staying in your lane sounds sensible. Focused. Disciplined. Stick to what you know. But what happens when the lane disappears? Or somebody builds a faster road next to your lane? Or your customers decide they're going a different way? Sometimes staying in your lane is good strategy. Then sometimes it's an excuse for not looking around your lane. How do you know which is the right strategy? Check out my blog before you stay or leave your lane. interlinegroup.com/mix/what-… #BusinessStrategy #Leadership #Growth #DecisionMaking

Show Me to the Sales Prevention Office Every company has a sales department. Some have a sales prevention department too. They just don't call it that. You know the people I'm talking about. The ones who explain why you can't sell something to somebody who wants to buy it. Wrong channel. Wrong customer. Wrong territory. Wrong procedure. Meanwhile, the customer is standing there with money. I've always wondered why companies work so hard to generate sales opportunities and then invent reasons not to pursue them. Maybe we should start measuring sales prevention. Do you have an office like that? Read my post. interlinegroup.com/mix/show-… #Sales #Distribution #BusinessDevelopment #Leadership

Everybody wants growth. Until growth requires changing something. Then come the objections. Too risky. Too expensive. Too disruptive. Let's wait until we're certain. The sky is falling. Certain of what? That nothing will go wrong? Good luck with that. Business requires taking risks. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. But doing nothing is a decision too. No pain, no gain. Remain the same. Read my post. interlinegroup.com/mix/no-pa… #Leadership #BusinessGrowth #Strategy #Change

Why does Chaucer's Wife of Bath tell us so much about herself before she tells us her tale? She's certainly not shy. But there's a difference between telling people about yourself and controlling what they think about you. That's one of the questions I explore in my analysis of her Prologue. Sometimes what a narrator chooses to tell us is as interesting as what happens in the story. Read with me. readingwithjimmy.com/blog/wi… #Chaucer #CanterburyTales #ReadingWithJimmy