The Hazard We Face From Developing A Monocultural Youth

Posted on August 26, 2011 by The Business Physician

The old adage that “Ye Shall Reap As Ye Shall Sow” is so true even without Biblical connotations and this article is not going to get into any of that here: Nonetheless, this principle applies as a maxim of which we should all be aware and live by.

Accordingly, it is my contention that we are now unwittingly reaping the consequences of having made some very poorly thought out, short-sighted yet seriously impactful decisions and choices that have led up to us now effectively short-changing our children and the youth of today which, in turn means we have set out to short change ourselves as a nation.

This comes, at least in part, from our having abrogated our responsibilities for educating, guiding, mentoring and molding them towards becoming effective, capable, self-sufficient, creatively productive adults: It is my view that we have bred a host of monoculturally limited young people with consequent limited ability for innovation and critical thinking. This article explores some of the possible reasons for this conclusion as an extention of data gleaned from personal experience and from recently published related material. Continue reading →

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A Growing Business Is A Smarter Business ~ It Seeks Answers Hidden In Data!

Posted on June 16, 2011 by The Business Physician

This discusses the importance of uncovering, gathering and using Business Intelligence data to help grow business. This is the process that leads to revealing Business and Market Trends and presenting this information to Decision Leaders across all functions within the business to facilitate making consequential rapid tactical and strategic decisions thereby swiftly implementing intelligently driven responsive course corrections in an ever continuous “measure=>review=>decide=>implement=>repeat” progressive cycle to gain niche advantages and profitability within the ever changing environment throughout the ever growing Global Marketplace within which all businesses operate today. And here again, MISSI can help. Continue reading →

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Starting, Building, Growing, Turning Around or Selling/Merging Your Business? Could You Use Some Help? What Kind?

Posted on June 2, 2011 by The Business Physician
New Business Plant Skeleton

This gallery contains 1 photo.

Growing any business in any financial environment – good or bad – is a continual experimental, and incrementally developmental, process; a “work” that is continuously “in progress”, a journey without end if handled correctly. There is a constant need to monitor and analyze direction and results: What is working? What is not? At MISSI, here we are looking to discover, define and evaluate the real needs of entrepreneurs seeking help in resolving business development challenges by seeking feedback from that audience. Continue reading →

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“Just In Time” (JIT) LEAN Manufacturing Hits Road Bump in Japan

Posted on March 24, 2011 by The Business Physician

The following provides an opportunity to discuss an item excerpted from the (03/24/11) New York Times Business Section under the “REUTERS BREAKINGVIEWS” (page B2) sub-section authored by ROB COX and WAYNE ARNOLD.

This has been excerpted here because it was run together with a separate leading piece about banking reforms that has no direct relevance to the specific topic here and thus could not otherwise be discretely tweeted.

DailyMailUK_KantoHwyAfterQuake

UK Daily Mail Photo of Great Kanto Hwy After Quake

This NYT article has important implications for any business happily running LEAN Supply-Chain Operations. Not that there is anything fundamentally wrong about the Just In Time (JIT) principle per se; in fact, it is an excellent method of running production operations AS LONG AS everything goes according to plan. However, the immensity of the aftermath impact of the recent earthquake upon Japan‘s infrastructure and business is very far reaching, not the least because there appears to have been no proactive “Black Swan Event” potentiality planning by a large number of key businesses thus now leaving a huge gap in the ability for industry there, and elsewhere around the world that depend upon materials supplied through Japanese business, to keep running where that business is now structured around JIT LEAN manufacturing principles. Many COO’s in fact are now scrambling to resolve this unexpected, unplanned hiatus in their supply chain operations.

Here is what Cox and Arnold had to say about this: Continue reading →

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Team Meritocracy? Team Diversity? ~ Can the former be achieved if the latter is a constraint?

Posted on July 16, 2010 by The Business Physician

“Lessons Learned: Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business)”

Preamble:
First let me acknowledge that the above subtitle has been taken directly from the title of a blog posted originally in February 2010 by Eric Ries ~ @ericries the guru (along with Steve Blank @sgblank) of #lean in web start-ups ~ that came back into focus recently; an event that was the stimulus to write this blog and which led to the choice of wording for the primary title for this blog. More about this below.

In the course of this edition of the MISSIcom blog, and in the context of the title and sub-title, I want to discuss with you some of the related issues underlying such key staffing considerations as I perceive them: Recruiting and Maintaining the best and the brightest; what are the factors to be considered in the effort to achieve a Meritocratic team comprised of an appropriately Diverse group of recruits? Is the goal of building a meritocratic team even capable of achievement if diversity has also to be achieved or are these actually mutually exclusive objectives? What do we mean by meritocracy and what do we mean by diversity?

In regard to recruiting processes, this discussion is not just about being, or even about attempting to be, politically correct in our choices of candidates or even about functioning appropriately under the directives of Affirmative Action nor is it about discrimination or avoiding discrimination per se albeit that we are naturally obliged ethically and morally as well as legally to bear such issues in mind when making recruiting choices. This is about how, in reality as individual human beings charged with responsibility for putting together a team, we most often tend to go about achieving what we individually consider to be a well balanced team of the best, brightest, appropriately most capable staff for most effectively achieving the objectives we have at hand while knowingly functioning within the bounds of these various constraints. Continue reading →

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A Growing Business Is A Smarter Business ~ It Seeks Answers Via In-Bound Marketing!

Posted on June 30, 2010 by The Business Physician

Today the smarter business uses Inbound Marketing and eCommerce principles. This approach effectively drives down costs while driving up results: The mode today is to create web sites, to blog, to twitter, to use Social Networks to spread the word about your offerings and to design and use your web site to not just share information about your products and services … and … Today the smarter business also heavily relies upon data; information that it gathers from visitors to its web site, its blogs, its tweets and from the internet in general where relevant to the business and the environment in which the business is operating. The Smarter Business Knows Answers Lie Hidden In The Data And Continually Seeks to Uncover Those Clues So As To Be Vigilantly Proactive In Its Decision Making. Continue reading →

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Communicating with your clients: Skype v WebEx v GoToMeeting

Posted on May 22, 2010 by Intrepid Business Venturer

At MISSI (Management Information Systems Solutions & Initiatives) for the past several years we have been using “GoToMeeting” very reliably to provide direct technical support of clients as well as for other more general communication pc-to-pc purposes such as for webinars and have found it easy and very effective for our purposes.

It is, perhaps ironic, that we arrived at the choice for GoToMeeting after first using WebEx for a while in conjunction with a software vendor. We also tasted AccuConference through connections with a past client and looked at a couple of other options. In an admittedly rather un-scientific manner, though cost was a consideration, we ultimately decided that GoToMeeting offered all we needed in terms of supporting and connecting with our clients – or rather, the combination of GoToMeeting together with our Skype account gave us the full scope of inter-communication functionality that we needed for our business in servicing our clients ~ the only reason that we exist as a business in the first place!

Mark Suster (@msuster) has just posted a very informative blog based upon his own experiences in this realm and prompted by the recent announcement of a $10M funding for “Huddle” which, according to Continue reading →

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Clever “Adobe Risk Management” Fake Alert ~ Do not be fooled!

Posted on May 7, 2010 by Intrepid Business Venturer

The above title for today’s cautionary tale was lightly ’stolen’ from the blog of our good friend Bill Houle, Director of IT for Verari Technologies, Inc.

There have been frequent rogue exploits by the cracker community to use references to Adobe Flash and suggesting that there is an update that must be applied as a simple, almost believable, foil to spoof people into doing things that would compromise their computer systems but a recent significant advancement in “social engineering” to con the recipient into unwittingly adopting the conclusions and actions promoted in the offending email have reached a level of sophistication that makes avoiding making a drastic mistake even harder to do. As time goes by we all need to be increasingly vigilant against making the mistake of falling for these spoofs for everyone that blindly goes where angels fear to tread makes the web world generally more hazardous for all of us.

With that introduction, we heartily recommend that you carefully read Bill’s blog with the above title at The Dark Side Geek: Interesting name that Bill has chosen for his blog given that he is one of the smartest white side geeks we have come across in many a year; his observations are very well worth considering, his advice well worth taking. In this instance, Continue reading →

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Is (packaged) Business Intelligence (BI) Software Coming Up Short?

Posted on April 30, 2010 by Intrepid Business Venturer

The article quoted below was written by David Needle and published April 29, 2010 on the ”IT Management” website at: http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/datbus/article.php/3879316

The article directly addresses a principle limitation of BI tools: The information presented to Decision Makers typically begs addition questions that then require asking IT for further reports to clarify the underlying issues so that intelligent decisions can be made based upon facts rather than intuition. This is exactly the kind of support that MISSI provides to our clients; The article does a good job of explaining why even if you already have BI tools available, you still additionally need the kind of business related knowledge and experience skills and services that we provide to help you make profitable decisions. Our people work directly with your people to provide the kind of BI you need to achieve profitable results. This all fits perfectly within the scope of our passion for growing business: It’s part of the strategy of mapping out where you are so you can compare with where you want to go and where you actually may be headed which may not be where you actually want to go. Without clear data, there can be no way to reliably chart your course and stay on course moving towards your goals.

“Business Intelligence software can play a vital role in helping IT and knowledge workers get a handle on increasingly huge warehouses of customer data and other information critical to their sales and overall business. But does that go far enough?

In many cases, the answer is no. Continue reading →

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Business Intelligence (BI) is Crucial to Profitable Decision Making

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Intrepid Business Venturer

This begs the question as to whether or not self-service BI is the answer for capital and manpower constrained small businesses or is this option just another temptation leading ultimately to yet another cash-drain, effort distraction and problem in waiting.

The following are extracts from an article that originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of TechTarget’s “SQL Server Insider e-zine”.

“In fast-paced businesses, the ability to gather and analyze data quickly can be an advantage over your competition. Additionally, being able to see that a product or service would prove to be a losing venture in the coming months allows you to shut down a product line to save millions. It stands to reason that the more people you have looking at data, the faster you will be able to come to some useful conclusions.

In theory, self-service BI is great, but is it practical? Continue reading →

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