Three Quotations to Consider and Discuss

By Dean Zatkowsky

1. "The business of America is business," said President Calvin Coolidge, justifying his administration's laissez faire policies. Then he handed the White House keys to Herbert Hoover in 1929 and slipped out of sight as the economy collapsed. And yet, one still hears Coolidge's words repeated as gospel. Do you believe that business is the business of America?

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Categories: Entrepreneurialism | Economics | Ethics | Investing | Optimism

7 comments - Posted by Dean Zatkowsky at 9:39 AM

Dumb Time is Smart Time

Because of my business success, I'm privileged to receive frequent requests for advice. One of my recommendations - that people engage in some pure "dumb-time" every day - often draws incredulous stares from audiences. Fortunately, Scientific American recently published an article that explains how unstructured playtime improves our creativity and reduces stress.

While I've always believed that play benefits adults and children, The Serious Need for Play provides important news for hovering "helicopter" parents who over-schedule their children for fear of educational competition: "Relieving stress and building social skills may seem to be obvious benefits of play. But research hints at a third, more counterintuitive area of influence: play actually appears to make kids smarter."

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Categories: Corporate Culture | Creativity | Education | Leadership

2 comments - Posted by Paul Orfalea at 6:55 AM

What Would David Packard Do?

By Dean Zatkowsky

Many businesses are going through the exercise of cutting costs to compensate for declining revenues. Some have chosen a path pioneered by David Packard.

In 1970, when the economy stumbled and Hewlett-Packard faced layoffs, Packard proposed - and the company embraced - a novel alternative. Rather than layoff 10% of the workforce, the entire company took a 10% work schedule cut, working just nine days every two weeks. As Packard explained in The HP Way, "The net result of this program was that effectively all shared the burden of the recession, good people were not released into a very tough job market, and we had our highly qualified workforce in place when business improved."  Packard hastened to point out that this solution only applied to what was clearly a temporary situation; the company could not guarantee full employment under all scenarios.

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Categories: Corporate Culture | Education | Entrepreneurialism | Leadership | Economics

0 comments - Posted by Dean Zatkowsky at 3:38 PM

Losing the Leveraged Lifestyle

One needn't wonder why people with large obligations, like the taxes on six or seven figure bonuses, don't have money put away to pay those taxes, or for their private fund capital commitments. It's the myth of the leveraged lifestyle, the fantasy that we can borrow ourselves into wealth. People forget that when we apply too much leverage, sometimes the lever breaks.

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Categories: Corporate Culture | Finance | Ethics

4 comments - Posted by Paul Orfalea at 4:36 PM

One Secret to Better Concentration

By Dean Zatkowsky, coauthor, Two Billion Dollars in Nickels

Business meetings are almost universally hated for being lifeless, tiresome time-wasters, and at school, only the most dynamic teacher or professor can escape the "boring" label. For many of us, conference rooms and classrooms symbolize excruciating visits to purgatory, as we struggle to overcome feelings of distraction and boredom. But why is it so hard to sit still and concentrate?

We now know that contrary to what our parents, teachers and bosses have believed and taught for generations, concentration has little to do with sitting still. In fact, struggling to sit still presents a serious impediment to concentration for many people.

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Categories: Corporate Culture | Creativity | Education | Disabilities

1 comments - Posted by Dean Zatkowsky at 7:04 AM

"When you run into debt..."

Americans marvel at the wisdom of our nation's founding fathers, who crafted a Declaration of Independence and Constitution that so eloquently express the aspirations of humankind through the ages. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, in particular, get a lot of praise for their genius.

Too bad we ignore their financial advice.

Both men spoke about the dangers of debt. Jefferson warned against public debt, perhaps generalizing from the demoralizing weight of his extensive personal debt. Franklin, one of the richest Americans in history and a lifelong proponent of liberty, made his position clear: "Think what you do when you run into debt; you give to another power over your liberty."

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Categories: Education | Finance | Economics

10 comments - Posted by Paul Orfalea at 10:16 AM

Bubble to Bubble

By Lance Helfert

Satirical newspaper The Onion ran this headline in July 2008: "Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In." The joke works because it's true, and because investment bubbles of the last fifty years were so frequent, so frenzied, and so well documented. The history of economics - and progress - has been a history of bubble and bust economic cycles.

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Categories: Finance | Economics | Investing | Optimism

0 comments - Posted by Dean Zatkowsky at 8:28 AM