“All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.”

Benjamin Franklin

(1706-1784)

What Pickpockets Can Teach Us

Every sales and marketing professional wants our attention..and no doubt we ourselves would like to be able to control the attention paid to us. Take 8 minutes for a fun and insightful TED Video with some interesting lessons on getting someone’s attention and predicting behavior…from a professional pickpocket!

Ditching Your IPAD

It’s difficult to think of a device that has enjoyed more success than the IPad. For many, it’s all but replaced the laptop. However, many business “power users” find that the functionality of their IPad lacks a few important features they’ve long enjoyed on their PCs…especially as regards Microsoft Office applications.

Vistage Speaker Mike Foster, (who presents to our CEO and Key Executive Groups across the country on IT Security) compares the Microsoft Surface Pro tablet against the Ipad and finds it compares very favorably, especially for C-Level execs.  Check out Mike’s recent blog entry before you invest in your next tablet or laptop.

Shameless Self Promotion Department:

Benjamin Franklin….Vistage Member?

Successful men and women have always sought the advice of peers; and Benjamin Franklin, often referred to as “The First American”, was no exception. Franklin built a successful printing business as a young man and was an avid learner and a voracious reader.  Most importantly, he also had great respect for the knowledge, wisdom and experience of others.

In 1727 at the age of 21 he created an organization that he called “The Junto” made up of a diverse group of local merchants, tradesmen and others; most much older than Franklin. They met every Friday at a Philadelphia tavern for discussion of a wide variety of topics.

Franklin appears to have been the ‘facilitator’ or “chairman” of the group and a list of a questions he used to guide the group’s discussions has come to down to us. Here are just a few of them:

1. Have you met with anything in the author you last read, remarkable, or suitable to be communicated to the Junto? particularly in history, morality, poetry, physics, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of knowledge?

2. What new story have you lately heard agreeable for telling in conversation?

3. Hath any citizen in your knowledge failed in his business lately, and what have you heard of the cause?

4. Have you lately heard of any citizen’s thriving well, and by what means?

5. Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?

6. Do you know of any fellow citizen, who has lately done a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation? or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?

7. What unhappy effects of intemperance have you lately observed or heard? of imprudence? of passion? or of any other vice or folly?

Franklin would have made a great Vistage member and/or chair. The PBS Website has additional information on The Junto and the rest of Franklin’s list of provocative questions. If you don’t have a group like Vistage to turn to, perhaps now is the time to explore membership.

ECON RECON: Groundhog Day?

It’s been five years since the big meltdown of the market in the fall of 2008. The recovery has been a slow but steady GDP growth since the spring of 2009 with unemployment lagging far behind. Economists Alan Beaulieu and Brian Wesbury note that we’ve been here before.

ITR Economics principal Alan Beaulieu’s latest blog entry shares concern that the resurgence of the mortgage debt instruments that caused so much havoc in 2008 may do so again down the line and cautions us to avoid “Financial Crisis Part Two”.  He also shares a few thoughts about China’s growing leverage and what they may have learned from our experience.

Economist Brian Wesbury looks at yet another pending fight about the debt ceiling, shutting down the government and the specter of default….and sees  Possible Shutdown, But No Default  in this one page analysis of what’s become a perennial headache.