. Everybody called him Al, even though his real name was Elmer. He lived in the industrial heart of Ohio back before it was the “Rust Belt.” The people who knew him thought he was an oracle. I met Al at a dry goods convention. I was there to give a speech. He was there because he owned and ran a dry goods store. In » Read More
Category: future
Boss’s Tip of the Week: Your New Year Do’s for 2018
OK. It’s 2018. Now what? You can plan. You can prepare. You can hope. But if you want your performance next year to be better, you must do things differently. Here’s your year-end/new year “Do’s Checklist.” What will you do more of? What will you stop doing? What will you start doing? What » Read More
A time for forecasts
It’s New Year’s time again and along with resolutions, goal setting, and bowl games, it’s time for experts to make forecasts. The bad news is that most of them will be wrong. The good news, at least for the forecasters, is that no one will ever check back to see how they did. Nevertheless, you will see » Read More
Looking ahead at 2016
“The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.” Peter Drucker said that over forty years ago. That hasn’t stopped prognosticators of all kinds from trying their hand at describing just how the future will be different. Every year at this time articles foretelling the future » Read More
If you can’t predict the future, what then?
This is the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 New York World’s Fair. What I loved most about it were the pavilions that offered views of the future. Most of those predictions turned out to be wrong. We humans are not very good at predicting the future. Sometimes we leave things out. Many early Twentieth Century » Read More