When I talk to various companies I am always intrigued by how they view working at home.  Some organizations readily embrace flexible hours and work from home.  But others treat working from home as evil.  As if the worst thing someone could do is spend time in comfort at their house (or apartment, or coffee shop, or, well you get the idea). The argument against working from home tends to revolve around “building relationships” and “being seen” at the office.  Both of these are good things, and work-from-home proponents tend to gloss over how important they are.  But a lot of ...

With all of the privacy changes to Facebook and the growing ease of finding people online, one of the growing areas of business is something called “online reputation management.”  The idea behind it is simple: you want to control how people see you online.  We probably all have embarrassing pictures of ourselves from some point in our lives (mine mostly involve the chicken pox).  Do we really want a future employer to see that? So companies are making a lot of money offering services to “manage your online ...

One of my goals this year is to streamline my life.  I know… me and everyone else.  But this year I am finally serious.  I have way too many projects to keep track of, and if I don’t streamline I will be crushed.  Metaphorically speaking I hope. Naturally this means I’ve been looking at everything through an inefficiency standpoint.  What is wasteful?  What adds time and uselessness to my life?  What detracts value? Trendnet does.  You see I bought a wireless internet card from them (which I love).  But it came with a rebate.  Now I understand the whole purpose of the ...

We live in world enamored with records, stats and facts.  We love people who know a lot.  But so often we confuse knowledge with skill.  Just because you know a lot doesn’t mean you are skilled.  I was thinking about this after a recent family visit to the dentist.  The long-term family dentist was retiring and they brought in a new, recent graduate from a prestigious school.  He graduated with honors, he was highly decorated and clearly qualified as a subject matter expert. The problem was, he wasn’t skilled.  At least not in bed side manner. He knew all of the ins ...

Social Media is all about the interaction between expert and audience, company and customer, blogger and fan.  It’s that dynamic that sets it apart from writing a book or producing a TV show.  Yet when we open up the conversation we’re bound to hear from people who don’t agree with us. The internet is not always filled with calm, reasoned people.  If you’ve ever read comments on YouTube you know exactly what I’m talking about.  People take great pride in ripping apart things they haven’t spent any time thinking about.  We call them trolls. But there’s also a group of people who ...