It’s one of those days. Maybe you have technical problems, or a project that isn’t going well, you couldn’t sleep last night, you’ve run into a writer’s block or thinker’s block or city block. Maybe you just lost a client. Or learned about a powerful new competitor. Or maybe it’s...

On the bad days, in off moments, it seems like my two years in business school were mostly about learning the definitions of a few key buzz words to use in meetings.

1. ROI

Stands for return on investment, as in profits divided by total investment. For fun in boring...

We baby boomers have lost too many cultural icons. Don't take away Woodstock.

Some nut shot John Lennon. Good journalism -- or was it reality? -- took away our faith in institutions. We've pretty much lost Ford, Chevrolet, General Motors, Wall Street, faith in television news, trust in doctors, air,...

I just read Scott Shane's First, Do No Harm to Small Business on the New York Times blog. And this is awkward because I like Scott, I've read and recommended his books, read his posts, and like his analysis. He does business numbers very well. But he's off...

Back in the old days, editors decided what was news, not advertisers and not readers. There was this concept called "news values." Full-time professionals laid out the front page. They tried to highlight important political, economic, and social trends, coverage deemed important, rather than celebrities, fashions, nudity, and violence.

This -- the TechCrunch publishes stolen information flap from last week -- is why I worry about the gradual disappearance of journalism as newspapers and traditional advertising disappear.

You may or may not have read about it. Somebody stole documents from Twitter's computer and sent them to TechCrunch. They...

Committees don't make great software. It takes a single person, an author. Maybe he gets some help. Teams don't do it. Nobody sees the whole elephant.

I'm pretty sure I heard that basic sentiment first in about 1986, from Dave Winer, who was then the author of a Macintosh...

Here's an exciting development: a true debate on ideas, on the web, spontaneous combustion, involving some very well known great thinkers of our time: Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, Mark Cuban, and Ellen Goodman.

Chris Anderson gathered the wood and laid out the fire. He's editor of Wired...

Is venture capital new, innovative small business, or just big business disguised?  Steve King at Small Biz Labs this morning has a good summary of the debate about venture capital and government-funded Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants.

Last year 3,600 smaller...

You know who you are. You hate selling, but here you are, making your way as entrepreneur, having to sell or sink.

Me? I'm a terrible salesperson. I'm also bad at networking, cocktail parties, and small talk with people I don't know. Do I seem stuck up, aloof? Not really,...

Secret cameras, secret Web utilities tracking employees' Web use, secret phone recording and IM monitoring: that's creepy. That's BIG BROTHER: the Orwellian 1984 nightmare. But bosses reading your tweets and Facebook? What's creepy about that isn't that bosses might do it, it's the rest of us complaining about...

I'm getting to know Twitter more these days, using it more, and enjoying it. I'm Timberry on Twitter. I'm frequently grateful to Twitter friends for pointing out good ideas, blogs, thoughts, pictures. Twitter enlivens my day, and brightens my writing.

I'm beginning to develop a sense of what to...

First 100 days? Small business? Face it: the federal government moves way, way more slowly than the average small business. Small business doesn't wait.

I asked other small business owners. How do you think the Obama administration did for small business in its first 100 days. I got a...

The boom in social media, my happy association with some very smart Generation Y people, and a good book or two (Me 2.0, among them, and Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz) have me very intrigued with a broader application of branding.

I was taught to think of branding as...

Two Very Important Sentences:

Fred Wilson of AVC posted my favorite line from the president's press conference today; and the whole post -- brilliant blogging, in my opinion -- was this simple quote:

At the same time, the rest of us can’t...

I love twitter. What blogging is to email, twitter is to instant messaging (IM) ... and then some. You can follow me on twitter as Timberry. I'm like a fish with a shiny new thing. And, with due respect to the MSNBC line (if you don't get it,...

The trouble with a small business bailout is deeply rooted in practical logistics. Small business is as diverse and wide spread as the country is. There are something like 25 million small businesses, and 20 million of them have no employees. How does the government help them?

It's time to...

Words and spin department: small business innovation. It's happening all the time, but we use different words to describe it:

But rather than calling it innovation, they simply describe what they do and the results they're looking for. Words such as "tweak," "adjust," "improve" and "change" roll off...

Back in the seemingly pre-historic 1950s an interviewer asked pianist Liberace if it bothered him that people made fun of his flamboyance (which was a code word, back then for being gay). He answered:

"I cry all the way to the bank."

Flash forward: this week and last, Jon...

I'm so done with people blaming "the media" for bad economic news. New media or old, one constant is that it's about getting an audience. What's news is what's different, surprising, interesting, or remarkable. It's not good or bad, it's news.

Today I saw the blog post here that...