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 though this article is not going to get into any of the latter aspects here.

This principle applies in life as a maxim of which we should all be well aware and live by; it is also the underlying idea used to offer an explanation for the title of this article. My contention is that we have long ago sown the seeds that have now led us to dealing with (coping with) a host of youthful Millennials and Generation Y’s now increasingly lost in a debilitating monocutural paradigm of starved and strangled innovation. We have lost – even given away – our edge as a world leader in productive creativity and innovation to foreign immigrant students and to foreign country competitors. Continue reading →

Posted in Employment, Management, Startup | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

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

Posted on June 16, 2011 by The Business Physician

The key difference between a business facing failure, stagnation and loss versus one facing growth ~ in market share, profitability and equity value ~ is, most often, not a case of differentials in access to cash but rather a case of differentials in access to clearly understandable, actionable, monetizable information; access to, and implementation of, intelligent business data. In fact, access to cash itself, even to funding or capital, can be greatly improved by first having access to answers uncovered by implementing effective, relevant, Business Information and Analytics to Yield Business Pertinent Intelligence (Business Intelligence/BI).

Today, data of all kinds relevant to every business, its customers, its market place, its profitability and related trends, are growing at a prodigious rate. At the same time, our ability to grasp potential opportunities this wealth of data may represent is either lost completely or at least obscured and thus inactionable. Consequently, indicators that might otherwise represent time relevant opportunities for strategic, even critical, business decisions and actions inevitably get missed as the data delivery rate and volume increases to levels equivalent to data-noise that buries clues within the deluge. Circumstances impossible to evaluate without expertise, time and custom software tools to help promote and support decision making at key process points across the entire enterprise. Fortunately, MISSI can help you with that. Continue reading →

Posted in Building Business, Management, Management Information Systems | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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

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.

New Business Plant Skeleton

Building a business from bare green-field site to fully operating production enterprise

There is a constant need to check and analyze direction and results: Is the mission still meaningful? Do we even have a quotable, believable and workable mission for our business? Are purpose and goals still relevant? Is the intended audience (market, customers) still open to expansion for our particular collection of products or services or is it shrinking as was the case for Buggy Whip makers in the early days of Automobiles replacing Horse Drawn Carriages. Is the revenue stream a net-cash-inflow and is the net profit margin and business equity value growing and capable of further growth … or not? So many questions that we must continuously ask ourselves, get answers and review to make sure our business direction is upwards and not stagnating or going downwards. Continue reading →

Posted in Building Business, Management, Marketing, Outsourcing, Startup, Supply Chain | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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

Posted on March 24, 2011 by The Business Physician

In Japan, following upon the earthquake and tsunami, the aftermath 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 →

Posted in Building Business, Supply Chain | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

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 →

Posted in Building Business, Employment, Management, Objectives, Startup | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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 →

More Galleries | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Communications, Objectives | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Security, Technical | 4 Comments

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 →

Posted in Management, Technical | Leave a comment

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 →

Posted in Technical | Leave a comment