I don’t have any interest in meeting celebrities. I met Rick Flair once. He came to my bar after a night of performing at the XL Center – still had his boots […]
John Demma
Welcome to my blog. I have been a manager for fifteen years, and for the past five years I have been leading teams of 500 people or more as a director and VP for large growth companies. I share my leadership journey and thoughts here with the hopes of helping and inspiring other leaders.
Gut Check – Getting Back Up
This barber, he had to be seventy, was telling me once while trimming me up how he just had a whole bunch of cancer surgically removed about a week earlier. Tough old dog, I […]
Management Skills: Create Symbiosis
That’s a picture of a cute little clownfish, we’ll call him Remo, swimming among sea anemone. Most fish would not be feeling too good right now, because those cool looking tentacles of […]
Modern Machiavelli: How to be a 21st century prince without selling your soul
Is it better to be feared or loved? Do the ends justify the means? Is all fair in business and politics? Machiavelli says, “Yes.” You may have heard of the book The […]
We All Know About the Same: Nothing
I’m a fraud and so are you. We run around pretending we know a thing or two about a thing or two. And we’re surround by all of these experts on subjects […]
Future Predicting: A bad business to be in
This was my tweet just minutes before kickoff of this past Sunday’s Super Bowl: Privately, also just before kickoff, I was quoted as saying, “If I was rich I would bet $200,000 […]
Strategy: Cortez the Killer
In 1519 Hernán Cortés the Conquistador led a flotilla of 11 ships to the eastern shores of Mexico against the direct orders of his superiors. You see, power and hubris had driven […]
Genealogy, Ancestry.com, and (you probably already stopped reading)…
Nothing, and I mean nothing, puts people to sleep faster than talking about the most boring of my boring hobbies: genealogy. Of the nearly 500 people in my family tree, only two of […]
Baby Brain
I’ve had some serious writer’s block lately. I’ve been tired. New assignment at work. New baby at home. So tired. In addition to a lack of blogging, I’ve noticed the following side effects […]
Leadership Style: Fake it till you make it
About a year ago, I wrote this post about how to articulate my/your leadership style. Thanks to Google, this has become my all time most viewed post with over 1,000 views. Today […]
Six Months With No TV (Kind of)
First of all, let me tell you I love watching TV. I don’t intend for this to be some high-brow TV-is-for-dummies blog post. Watching TV is awesome. Whether it’s a live NFL […]
Real World, Fake World: How to be a successful manager, leader, and person
As I detailed in this kind of weird article, the work world is not the real world. Work is a made up place, work hierarchies are made up things, and there’s really […]
It’s Only Work
Not only is business management my vocation, it’s also my avocation. In my free time I write this blog, manage two three-family investment houses, and help with two companies as an unpaid […]
Management Skills: Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick
I swore I wasn’t going to be one of those parents who would toss empty threats at their kids to try to coerce them into good behavior. You know the old, “If […]
Personal Finance: There and Back
I had a few bad years of personal finance. I was one of those guys who bought houses without any money during the Great Housing Boom of the 2000s. I bought my […]