Moments
With
Marty

Conventional wisdom tells us that we have to put people before profits… that if we look after our people, they will look after our customers, and the business will thrive. Anyone who has the temerity to disagree with this sentiment exposes themself as an uncaring, self-interested sociopath… which, in turn, serves as a reminder to […]

I know that the phrase, it’s a marathon, not a sprint, is a tired old cliche… but it just seemed to be appropriate for this moment.  And I can speak with some authority on the matter, at least, because I ran a few marathons back in the good old days: I’m talking about the days […]

Well-run businesses can be boring. They don’t experience frequent crises and they don’t encounter surprises at every turn. Why? Because the leaders understand risk, and they plan accordingly, avoiding the majority of disasters that other companies are routinely forced to face.  As you may know, I started my career in IT, well before this was […]

We outsource a lot of things, in business and in life. How do we decide what to outsource, and what to do ourselves? In the 1990s, outsourcing became all the rage, particularly in the IT industry, where I was working. But the principles behind outsourcing have their roots in the economic theory of comparative advantage, […]

This post is inspired by an article that Denise Lee Yohn had published in Harvard Business Review in 2018. And, I defy anyone to read that headline and not feel compelled to read the article. Yohn drew on research from hundreds of companies, finding that 90% of all corporate values statements have the words “ethical” […]