Socrates Says

“Long-term Treasury bond yields are an excellent barometer of economic activity. If business conditions are better than normal and improving, exerting upward pressure on inflation, long-term interest rates will be high and rising. In contrary situations, long yields are likely to be low and falling. Also, if debt is elevated relative to GDP, and a […]

Customers want certainty. They want to know the price of the job before they give you authorization to proceed. They want to know when you will be finished, a completion date before you start. They tell us this is every survey that I have seen in the capital goods industries.  If they tell us what […]

The parts business is in a rut. We have been doing the same thing for decades now. Isn’t it time to put a fresh face on the parts business and offer customers improved service and convenience? Start with the tired counter. The stand-up counter has been dead for a long, long time. Some of you […]

Do not confine you children to your own learning, for they were born in another time. Chinese Proverb   Every heart sings a song incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Plato   Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is. German Proverb

It starts quietly, the defense of the Keynesian failures.  Published Wednesday in Global Post – Northwestern economist Robert Gordon opines that “We’ve had a lot of inherent advantages: abundant natural resources, favorable demographic trends, relative political stability supported by the protective benefit of two oceans, to name a few. But from colonial times to the […]

My good friend Jay Roszell just posted to his blog – Growth without Pain – “What is the True Cost of Sales Training.” In it he lists off the costs of the training which includes the usual suspects but he goes further and touches on “opportunity costs.” The cost of any activity cannot be measured […]