Business Blogs: Trends, tips, and real-life anecdotes from industry experts.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a renowned historian who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for her book on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. More recently she authored Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
Mixing in her observations on both Presidents and their extraordinary leadership skills, she recently wrote an article that was published in [...]

I guess my husband and I always had in the back of our heads that we would have kids, so that when we were old and grey we would have someone to push around our wheelchairs, or at least extricate our Rascal scooters when they get hopelessly wedged between oddly out-of-date pieces of furniture.
I also had dreams [...]

I’ve been appearing here and there on The Big Idea with Donny recently. Thought you might get a kick out of how the show comes together and the role of so-called experts (yours truly included) who are invited on the show.
Below are the emailed questions I received from the producers in advance of my most [...]

For those of you who run a business or are trying to get one off the ground, I bet you’ve had a run-in or two with a crisis of some kind.
It may have taken the shape of a loss of data, or a short-fall in needed cash. Perhaps it was a lawsuit or a personal [...]

I received a text message over the weekend from one of the co-founders of our new startup company Showcase U. It was short and sweet, as text messages tend to be. But it spoke volumes.
The message talked about how starting up a brand new company from scratch is extremely challenging and even though we have [...]

At PFL, we focus hard on developing leaders from within. A number of our senior people were originally hired into entry-level positions, and worked their way into positions with progressively greater responsibility.
Nonetheless, I think a company needs to bring in some amount of outside talent in order to get fresh approaches and diverse experiences. Also, [...]

Thought leader Dave Bayless has a fascinating post on what he calls the Free Rider Problem. He posits that in a small company, everyone’s contribution is visible and makes a big difference, but as a company grows, an increasing number of slackers sneak in, eventually driving out the high performers and leading to the death of the [...]

Maybe it’s political correctness run amok. Maybe it’s a desire to avoid accountability. Whatever the cause, the business world is full of weasel words: evasions, exceptions, and buts. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like it is getting harder to find people or companies who will say what they mean in a clear, straightforward, [...]

Penelope took a break from her desk today and went outside to let her dog get some fresh air. While she was outside, I snapped this picture of her stretching, with the Absaroka Beartooth wilderness in the background.
It reminded me that in a high-growth company, flexibility is essential. Everybody needs to be willing to do [...]

I’m reminded today that all of life is about relationships with other humans. StartupNation headquarters is not the bustling place that it normally is today. It’s because many of our team members are not here in the office today. Oh, the ones who are here are every bit as bustling as they normally are, but [...]