My grandfather turned 90 years old this week.  As long as I’ve been alive, he’s been impossible to shop for.  Now that I’m a working mom, I have less time than ever to figure out what to get him, so I usually just include him in a family gift of tasty treats.  But the man has had quite the life, and this year I really wanted to ...

My friend and radio show co-host Lindsey Pollak has a brand new blog over at Fast Company.  Her first, post, 5 Ways to Take More Control of Your Career, comes at a perfect time as we all sit in shock over the demise of long-established, powerful financial institutions Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.    Many people who would ...

So Bill Gates is preparing to retire as CEO of Microsoft. Gates and his childhood friend Paul Allen founded Microsoft on April 4, 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to make and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800, an early computer that was sold to hobbyists. Gates dropped out of Harvard University in his third year to focus on ...

When you get to a certain point in your career, the tendency is to think you’re supposed to be an expert in everything pertaining to your field.  After all, you have years of experience under your belt, you keep up on new developments well enough, and you’re the one people are always asking for advice.    Regardless of your ...

You know those creepy-crawly plastic insects kids play with around Halloween time?  Back in the day, my friends and I would throw a bunch of them against the wall and then see which one would stick.   When I saw these in the store last week, they got me thinking that a lot of people have careers that involve exactly the same ...

[ImageAttachment]   Marketing blogger extraordinaire Seth Godin has a great post on the various ways people defend the status quo, and consequently quell innovation in their organizations.  Seth actually heard or read all of these quotes about actual good ideas.    ''That will never work.'' ''... That said, the labor laws ...

I’m reading a great book by Tom Kelley called The Ten Faces of Innovation.  Kelley says that a lot of successful innovators look closely at things that have been done a certain way for a long time, and find a way to improve on them.  He talks about some interesting examples.  Accident claims were always taken over the phone by ...