It’s really rare these days for a growing company to ever do its payroll by hand. Everyone signs up for a traditional payroll service, such as ADP or Paychex, or a newer SaaS payroll service such as Gusto. I’ve seen companies go through this drill more than once. Two in particular stick out as having…

The HBR recently shared the results of a study showing that an increase in the amount of flattery received by a CEO disproportionately increased the likelihood of the CEO being fired. “You look mahvelous” Flattering the CEO increases chance of getting [him] fired http://t.co/2odFtkwBW3 — rickcolosimo (@rickcolosimo) November 5, 2013 That link is dead: look…

Many of my clients are founders and CEOs of their companies. Sometimes, they’re inexperienced in this role, regardless of how old they are or how much education they have. One of my common themes for some of these folks is the “you’re the boss” speech. When you are the CEO, you are the captain of…

This Lifehacker post attempts to answer the question of how someone should handle befuddling legal documents, like terms of service, leases, car rental contracts, and so on. The easy answer is in the article: of course you should read everything. The problem is that that’s not what lawyers actually say and do because it’s advice…

This LinkedIn question asked about mission drift for non-profits. There are a couple different layers of answer, depending on what’s going on and who’s asking. First, the fundamental concern: will the change of mission jeopardize nonprofit status (and that typically means jeopardize 501(c)(3) status, which means deductibility of donations by donors)? The answer depends on…

In this earlier post on single-issue voting, I described the genesis of my new political strategy/philosophy. So what? My goal is to create a framework for very specific, detailed information about politicians and voting records at all levels of government: federal, state, and local. We need to track not just voting on new laws but…

This brief post on the Speed Limit for Change caught my eye. Not for the concept, which I think is silly on an individual level but possibly sensible from an organizational behavior perspective as an empirical observation. It reminded me of one of the best bits from Al Dunlap’s Mean Business (aff. link) (before he…

A manager recently asked how he could go about reconciling his implementation of cultural changes that enhanced the teamwork of his department in the face of corporate-level directives that didn’t support, if not detract from, his plans. This manager did not understand why this company did not want to support his ideas and why employees,…

In a recent post referring to Ted Wang’s “simple series A” proposal, I noted that I would separately discuss legal opinions. Non-lawyers, and lawyers new to transactional practice, have probably never really heard of a legal opinion or what it does. Briefly, the legal opinion letter is a carefully prepared document that is designed to…

Snarkmarket: The Starbucks API. This is brilliant insight. Just brilliant. If there’s a post like this in every 20 or 50, this blog is worth reading. The deep message here is about core competencies (I just saw a reference to an article about companies outsourcing their core competency — have to find it and will…

In our business, we focus a lot on the use of weighted averages in analyzing business problems. An article in today’s WSJ discusses the seemingly disproportionate and unexpected role of Chuck E. Cheese restaurants in arrests for fights. This article reminded me of an idea I had many years ago while interning at the Tompkins…