It seems that everyone is spending more than they bring in. How can that be? If you were in charge of the government, how would you balance the budget?

I’m often quick to criticize an ad campaign that makes no sense, or that treats it’s customers poorly; so when I heard the new DEXONE radio commercials I had to take a minute to praise a well thought through campaign.

The City of Chicago’s recently decided to move the annual fireworks display out of Grant Park and push back the date from July 3rd to July 4th. This was in part to cut costs; but also an effort to scale back the event so that it’s not such a security concern. Will Chicago’s decision be a case study for how slashing your budget can solve an immediate problem while creating a long-term problem at the same time? Or, will it be be heralded as one of the greatest cost-cutting moves/compromises of all time? What do you think?

I know that I’m reading a really great book when I keep nodding at each page, “yes, yes, exactly…” The authors are telling me something that I knew intuitively, yet somehow they have given voice to that hunch and even explained it with elegance. That’s exactly the experience I had while reading “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath.

After reading Donald Miller’s “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” cover-to-cover over the course of a long weekend (I could hardly put it down at points) I’m now soaking in some of these lessons. I know that my story will be different for having read it. Here’s ten things I learned from this book.

I frequently get asked what books I would recommend to improve the skills of founders of creative service firms. Here are a few of the books and articles that have most formed me as a business owner and leader.

Fear is perhaps the most powerful stupid drug that the human body has ever felt. When we are afraid our reasoning and thinking is disabled by our body and instead we are thinking with our brainstem, basically reacting to reflexes instead of acting. Business owners can’t survive like that.

In the last week I have attended two different economic forecast presentations, where I heard 4 different economists and prognosticators describe what the see in the year ahead for the US and world economies. I am not an economist and so what I’ve written here is my interpretation of what they predicted, not predictions of my own.

With the rise of blogs, YouTube and Twitter we have more creative content produced to day than ever before. Let more and more of it is DIY or created by amateurs. Is this the death of the creative class, or a fundamental shift in the role that professional creatives play?

In 2010 I’m going public with my goals as a way to help me to achieve more of them. These are my 2010 health goals.