On September 23, after 25 years of operation, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection. They have been battling intense competition from Netflix (mail order and web movie service) and Coinstar (DVD rental kiosks), among others. They have closed over 1,000 company-operated stores in the past two years. According to a Bloomberg report, CEO James Keys said …
John’s Blog
Quick Words: Apple takes big bite of mobile industry profits
According to FORTUNE magazine, Apple has garnered 39% of the mobile handset industry profits while taking much less in market share. During the first half of 2010 Apple sold 17 million handsets. Nokia, Samsung and LG collectively sold 400 million and all others combined sold 190 million. Yes, these numbers are striking. Clearly Apple does …
How much time do you have?
Miller was laid to rest today. Love. Friends. Family. Honor. Tears. A sense of “graduation.” Miller was 21 years old, but was mature, wise and kind far beyond those 21 short years. We’ve been friends with his mother and father for about 15 years so we’ve had the chance to watch Miller and his younger …
Is your busyness hurting your business?
Scenario One: During a recent phone conversation with friend who had just shut down his business of 23 years he reminded me of a scene from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises where the main character, Mike Campbell, is asked “How did you go bankrupt?” The answer was “Gradually… then all of a sudden.” Scenario Two: Last week …
Why does kudzu smell like leadership?
We all need to get away sometimes. “Away” doesn’t have to be somewhere exotic, or some place that involves boarding passes or long car trips. Not even a weekend getaway. Just a respite; a brief time out from the day-to-day routine that provides a recharge, a renewal, or a reset. One of my favorite breaks …
Should you imprint your employees?
According to vulture-territory.com, the California Condor has been protected since 1953 and was listed as an endangered species in 1971. By 1986, for a variety of reasons, the wild populations had sunk to single digits. Soon the three remaining California Condors were captured and joined twenty-four others in captivity. The birds have adapted reasonably well …
The really important things in life are simple, just not easy.
To say that I was an eager first time father would have been a great understatement of the facts. I was excited. Scared. Thrilled. Uncertain. Confident. Expectant (in a somewhat different way than my wife). The main thing I wanted was to be prepared; I’d never been a father before and I didn’t want to …
Why we do things is more important than what we do
“Anything you can do I can do better; I can do anything better than you.” is one of the most memorable lines from the song Anything You Can Do which was composed by Irving Berlin for the 1946 Broadway musical, Annie Get Your Gun. The song is a spirited duet, with one male singer and …
The Politics of Leadership; the Leadership of Politics, Part 2
My client began the conversation with, “I hate politics!” As a senior vice president in a large closely held firm she had seen plenty of office politics and she didn’t like what she had seen – and experienced. In my previous post I introduced some thinking about politicians as leaders. The other side of the …
The Politics of Leadership; the Leadership of Politics, Part I
Perhaps it’s the season – election season – that’s generating more frequent discussions from my clients and others about how politics fits, or doesn’t fit, into the context of leadership, and vice-versa. My initial reaction to these discussions begins with the Forrest Gump-like assertion that leadership is as leadership does. Before we go any further, …
