Unprecedented times are upon us. The Covid-19 crisis is affecting all of us. In particular, it's forcing many organizations to send their employees home to work remotely. This sounds like an easy thing to do - work from home. But for those of us who have been doing it for years, we know there are some things you need to do and do them quickly. It's all about staying sane while working from home.  Once you have figured out how to access your business data and applications (blogged about

It's hard to come up with fresh materials for social media. Every weekend when I plan out my tweets for the week, I've settled on having a general theme. It helps me gather material and puts a focus on things that come up spontaneously throughout the week. As I have said before, life in general is the best producer of ideas for posts. My social media theme this week in Nurture Marketing. What led me to this idea was actually reading another article about selling. The article talked about

We’ve all heard the saying, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”  Maybe you can’t MAKE him drink, but... you can ENTICE him to drink. You can provide beautiful, convenient and tasty water so that he WANTS to drink.  Let’s apply this analogy to software UI (screen layout) design. Designing a user interface that is attractive, intuitive and efficient is key for user adoption and ultimately, imperative to the success of your software implementation

During a meeting last week we were discussing a book to review during a quarterly education event coming up. Cleaning out my desk drawers the week before, I stumbled upon a miniature edition of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  I suggested we use that as our book review. It's timeless and still very relevant. That idea made me go look for the full size version and I re-read it over the weekend. Well, mostly I sped-read it. The reading event triggered my blog post today. Every

Last week was National Procrastination Week so it inspired a theme for some of the articles in our monthly newsletter (which ironically is one week late.) That is just dripping in irony. For years, I have been a proponent of time management and organization. But I can and do procrastinate when there is something I simply don’t want to handle. Whether it’s that grumpy customer or an employee issue, the situation isn’t going away. It’s best to deal with it head on. The hard things you

Lifehacker.com says, “Mind mapping is one of the best ways to capture your thoughts and bring them to life in visual form.” Mind mapping allows you to capture your thoughts or those of a group in a very unstructured way and then tie those thoughts together as you go along. It is great for brainstorming ideas without the structure of outlines and notes. According to Tony Buzan, “A Mind Map is a powerful graphic technique which provides a universal key to unlock the potential of the brain.

[caption id="attachment_1516" align="alignleft" width="300"] The skiils of an architect and consultant make a perfect marriage of styles and ideas for helping a business grow.[/caption] My youngest son is an architect. We, including my oldest son, are computer and business consultants. Sitting in the living room one night we started talking about what he does and how it compliments what we do. We ask a lot of questions when working with clients. The questions are to help us understand the

Several years ago I wrote this blog article and after working with a client recently I figured it was time to post it again.  We went over exactly what was in the post and I thought that would be great to blog about. And I went, duh, I already did. Here it is. Time to ACT. What does that say to you? Time to do what you need to do? Now’s the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country? You get the idea. It means time to do what needs to be done. Ok, Let’s take it to