Australia's Bernard Tomic was fined his full Wimbledon prize money this week for not meeting the "required professional standard" during his lackluster 58-minute first-round defeat by Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Tomic was docked the maximum £45,000 ($56,100) penalty for his limp performance in Tuesday's 6-2 6-1 6-4 loss to Tsonga, the shortest men's match at Wimbledon since … Continue reading What If We All Faced Such Consequences in Our Jobs?
Who would have known that a decision I made as a nine-year-old would have predicted the career I have chosen for the past 33 years. When I was about nine-years-old I discovered that I liked swimming, and with my parents' encouragement, I joined the local swim team. I think back then swimming was a more … Continue reading A Choice I Made as a Nine-Year-Old Determined My Career Path
I was randomly paging through Seth Godin's 17-pound book, "What Does It Sound Like When You Change Your Mind?", when I came across one of his posts titled "Hobson’s choice, Occam’s razor, Wheeler’s which and the way we decide". I was familiar with Hobson's Choice and Occam's Razor, but I had never heard of Wheeler's … Continue reading What in the World Is Wheeler’s Which
"Is marketing the art of tricking people into buying stuff they don’t need? Or is it about spreading ideas that people fall in love with?"- Seth Godin The above is a question Seth posed way back in 2005. It seems as if Kraft is in the camp that believes marketing is about tricking people. Kraft … Continue reading I Don’t Think Seth Godin Would Approve
I stopped drinking alcohol about eight years ago, basically for health reasons. I will admit I missed the taste of beer, so I would occasionally have a non-alcoholic beer, like O'Douls. (I should also point out that I eat fake hamburgers and drink decaf coffee - I know, what a crazy life I lead). I … Continue reading Proof Once Again That I’m Not a Trendsetter
This past week, an anonymous fan bid a record $4,567,888 in a charity auction to have lunch with Warren Buffett, topping the previous record of $3,456,789. The annual auction for lunch with the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman has raised almost $30 million for San Francisco charity Glide, a favorite cause of Mr. Buffett’s first wife, … Continue reading Forget about That $4.6 Million Lunch with Warren Buffett; This Would Be Way More Fun
Salesforce, a cloud-based software company which earns the bulk of its revenue from its customer-relationship management (CRM) service, publicly announced today that it was banning retailers that sell certain guns and ammunition from using its sales management software. The policy was actually put into place back in April, but today was the first day the … Continue reading Thank you Salesforce (and Amazon and eBay and Dick’s Sporting Goods and Shopify and Walmart and Levi Strauss and Toms Shoes and Citigroup and United Airlines and Delta and Hertz and MetLife)
Villanova University was blessed to have Bert Jacobs, co-founder of the Life is Good brand, as its commencement speaker this past weekend. Bert started selling t-shirts with his brother John out of a van back in 1989. But as their web site points out, it was not very prosperous. They lived on peanut butter and jelly, … Continue reading “Life Is Good” Co-Founder Delivers Inspirational Commencement Speech and a Few Well-Thrown Frisbees
I'm currently reading Bad Blood, the fascinating, yet depressing, inside look at the story of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. While I plan to offer a more in-depth review of the book when I finish it, I found one question posed in the book to be intriguing. A group of Theranos employees was having lunch, and … Continue reading Would You Rather Be…?
A few weeks ago I signed up for my first Coursera course - Introduction to Probability and Data, and today I was informed that I had successfully passed the course. The course is part of a five-course Certificate, Statistics with R Specialization (R is a computer language focused on statistical analysis); The other four courses … Continue reading I Just Completed My First Coursera Course, and All I Can Say Is Wow
Borden's Blather 