This month my company featured me on our portal in a blog-style interview. I thought I’d share since I haven’t posted much about work lately. Here you go: Get to Know John Demma We all share common goals, […]
Category: Leadership
These posts contain my ideas, tips, and strategies for leading and managing groups of people in modern organizations.
Expense Savings Go Right to the Bottom Line
You may have heard someone say that expense savings go right to the “bottom line”. What does that mean? What is the bottom line anyway? For a business, the last line on the income statement […]
The Great Man Myth: Or how the Simpsons and Tolstoy will calm your nerves when meeting Rick Flair
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 and shorts on. […]
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 thought. “I can’t […]
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 the anemone are […]
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 Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli’s […]
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 from economics to […]
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 Cortés mad, and […]
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 I’m writing about […]
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 no such thing […]
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 board member. I’m […]
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 you don’t stop […]
Management Skills: Be Fit
Getting into shape is a good business decision. And this isn’t one of my weird and abstract metaphor posts that’s really about mental fitness or business fitness or something. This post is about why I […]
Not All the Turtles Make it to the Sea
Jack and I watched this movie called Tortuga, about an adorable sea turtle’s journey from birth through adulthood. The movie starts on a beach where adult female sea turtles have dug hundreds of nests in […]
Should I Get an MBA?
One sunny summer day, when I was 25, I was driving along the Massachusetts Turnpike between stores, and, from no where, an idea popped into my head. Freshly promoted that July, I was feeling pretty […]