The Pragmatic Strategist

Using Tech to Make More Businesses Non-Tech

I grew up in a family-owned business.  I remember, back in the early 1980′s, when my mother (the bookkeeper) got her first computer for the business: it was a Data General and it was bigger than our dishwasher.  It had five-and-a-quarter floppy disks; it had virtually no RAM to speak of; and it came with [...]

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A Pragmatic New Year

Well, I can’t say that I’m sorry to have seen 2009 go. Personally and professionally, it was one hell of a rough year. On the other hand, it did bring with it some changes that — despite fighting pretty voraciously at first — have ultimately proven to be profoundly valuable. The biggest and most obvious [...]

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Grumble, Bumble, Facebook Trouble

I was reading an article this weekend, on Entrepreneur.com, and it actually made me a little snarky. In Health Insurance, a 401(k) and…Facebook?, author Justin Petruccelli discusses a new Junior Achievement/Deloitte Teen Ethics Survey in which 58% of teenage respondents stated that the ability to use social networks would be a factor in their decision-making [...]

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Keeping Your Spirits Up During a Job Hunt

Job hunting is rough for oh-so-many reasons. One of the things that is hardest about it, though, is managing your own attitude and spirits. If there is one thing that is liable to get you into trouble during a job hunt, it is unmanaged anxiety. I’ve written before about some of the things that I [...]

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A Left Turn in the Gen X Timeline

Sort of figures: tonight was the first time in weeks I’ve been able to set aside some time to do some catch-up blogging. I have a list of things I’ve been meaning to write about — I was just trying to work the opportunity into my schedule. And now that tonight is finally here, I [...]

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Wendy Laments for the Lost Boys

This week has been a bit of a melancholy week: my former team at Massive (acquired by Microsoft in 2006) has found themselves almost all the victims of radically changing economic conditions. As part of Microsoft’s plan to reduce several thousand jobs in 2009, their Massive division has been almost entirely cannibalized. Aside from the [...]

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20/20 Hindsight – Transitioning a Services Company to a Product Company

This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. The fact that we started off as a services company is what allowed us to get started and to avoid having to rely on outside funding. But it was transitioning to a product company that allowed us to grow and scale, and to ultimately [...]

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