“It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.  If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

 Warren Buffett

THE ART OF THE SUPERACHIEVER

The 24 hour media serves up a steady menu of super-achievers.  Many of us admire these people but have no idea how they have accomplished their remarkable feats.  A husband and wife team recently looked at this phenomenon through in-depth interviews of super achievers and have set forth their findings in a new book: The Art of Doing: How Super achievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well.   

A brief but excellent summary of their book recently appeared in Forbes. Check out   How To Be A Super-Achiever: The 10 Qualities That Matter  before you buy the book. The good news is all of us can do these things;  the question is will we?

INTERNET TRENDS

We all know that the internet and mobile devices are changing our world minute by minute.  Check out this summary of Internet Trends  over the last 5-10 years.  It’s 88 slides, but they are so well done you can click through them and gestalt the gist in just a few minutes, then go back and focus on the ones that pertain to your business. In light of these trends, what aspects of your company operations should be “re-imagined?”

ECON RECON:

The Pessimists are Wrong:  Economist Brian Wesbury looks at the media and then the data and advises us not to listen to the “ Pouting Pundits of Pessimism”.  His optimism includes a Dow of 15,000 by the end of the year.  Take six minutes and find out why he’s so bullish by viewing his latest Wesbury 101 offering “The Pessimists Are Losng.”

China Watch:   Vistage Staff Economist and ITR Economics principal Alan Beaulieu warns “Any way you look at it, there are troubles ahead for China, and by extension, these problems can be expected to negatively impact US exports to China.”   Learn why he feels this way by checking out his recent blog entry  “Trouble Ahead from Chinese Lending Practices.”

ARE YOU “ENABLING” YOUR IT STAFF?

The so called “Digital Divide” can be found not only between young and old,  rich and poor, but between CEO and his or her IT Staff.   Often, the CEO is rightfully grateful when the IT staff has solved a problem; but thanking the IT Staff may be tantamount to enabling them to continue behaviors that contributed to the problem in the first place.

CEOs are as dependent as the rest of us on IT and often, because of a lack of technical knowledge, may be reticent to question the IT leaders about what really happened and how it was fixed.  Mike Foster,  veteran Vistage speaker on IT Security and CEO of The Foster Institute suggests a question that may put the relationship between CEO and IT back on its proper footing.  Find out in his blog posting,  How to Make IT Fail.