Tag: Business

Hire a CPA or Do It Yourself?

MBA courses insist you take accounting.  Ever hear an MBA student rave about their accounting classes?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to teach students what to look for in a good CPA?

Don’t leaders in organizations have finance departments?

Isn’t the leader’s purpose to lead? To set the course?  To dream, to communicate and to inspire the vision?

Maybe I’m missing something.  Maybe I’m not.

So, just wanted to get our minds thinking about this.

All I’m pointing out is that society places a certain “worth” on an MBA degree.  I’m not disagreeing with that.

Society also places a certain worth on reading the best selling business books.  Not disagreeing with that either.

For me, what it all comes down to is that degrees, or books, don’t matter much if you can’t translate what you know – into something much better than before.

It’s almost like buying a gym membership, or exercise equipment, but not using it.

You Know What He Told Me?

Business Consultant
Business Consultant

Ever ask a nine-year old for business advice?  I did recently.

Pondering the pros and cons of going solo versus partnering, on a special project.  So, just for kicks, I asked my son (9).

He said, “Two heads are better than one”.

For the next few minutes, my son and I waited for our friend to arrive.

The correct answer in hand, we had a great meeting.

Number One Reason

Last weekend, my son (9) and I were relaxing in our pool at sunset.  I asked him, “You know why I’m working so hard on the business, right”?

“In case you lose your job”?, he said, questioning.

“Well sort of, but not really because of that.  I would like to have more control over the impact one can make on our world.  Being a business owner doesn’t guarantee that, but it sure does increase the odds”.

Reminded him of the power of hard work and how it’s harder at the beginning, in virtually everything, because there’s so much to learn.

Funny thing, for a nine-year old, he gets it.  And it’s easy to see why.

When his Dad became a parent, he worked really hard at the beginning, because there was so much to learn.

PS.  What I didn’t tell him is the “business” is my attempt to help raise enough money to find a cure for his disease.

Google Study Tips

Google Study Tips

“You can observe a lot by watching”. — Yogi Berra

Google dominates search engine.   Disney dominates family entertainment.

I enjoy watching and learning from them.

They say, “To teach is to learn twice”.

As a 35-year business professional, including 25 year here in Central Florida,  I’ve become quite the Disney expert.

I really hadn’t noticed, until I started to do the math.

For the past ten-plus years, I’ve been a professional speaker, teaching world-class business strategies and business tactics – averaging four days per week teaching.

Assuming 46 weeks per year teaching, multiplied by four days per week, multiplied by 10.3 years teaching  – roughly 2,000 days of keynote speeches, multi-day workshops, etc.

Even more staggering, to me, is to roughly estimate the average audience size to be 250.   The largest group I taught was 3,000.  The smallest, ten.

Bottom line?

I’ve taught over one-half million people.

That’s 500,000!   Wow!  Who knew?

Carpe diem, jungle jeff 🙂

The Stone Cold Truth

A few days ago, I promised to write more about the phrase, “the stone cold truth“. Here’s a start.

It’s a rarely used asset in much of the corporate world. Why?

Because most of us are trained to be nice to people. When we actually hear the truth, we often don’t feel good about. Why?

I think it’s because we don’t get it enough and therefore it surprises us so much, that it actually hurts. Blind spots are called that because of the key word, blind – can’t see it.

The next post is just a small taste of what I’m scratching the surface on. Happy Tuesday,  jeff noel