The GameStop stock frenzy seemed like a flash-in-the-pan but then, last week, it was reinvigorated. What Lessons Found can business owners and CEOs gain from it? “[The last week of January] was the week when a bunch of amateur traders made Wall Street’s finest look like idiots.” This is the opening sentence for one report on GameStop’s stock 500% runup. By now, we have all heard this tale and its consequences including billions lost; a rushed investment to save Robin Hood; Robin Hood’s freezing trades of the stock and the call for congressional hearings. The resulting panic and lack of a coordinated response indicate that few considered the possibility of a social media driven stock run – let alone how to address it. But should regulators, Robin Hood, and hedge funds caught-short been better prepared?
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GameStop Stock Frenzy: A Lesson in Contingency Planning
GameStop Stock Frenzy: A Lesson in Contingency Planning
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Why innovate now? Read the signs.
Why innovate now? Read the signs.
The pandemic gave us a new variety of cheese. How this new variety came about offers us a Lesson Found on innovation. Producing French munster is a laborious process that requires regular brine washings for a month or longer. (French munster is not to be confused with its less pungent American cousin, muenster cheese.) During France’s first lockdown, one farmer neglected to keep up with this process for 60 wheels of cheese. When he returned four weeks later, the cheese looked and tasted different. The farmer noted that the cheese had “taken the flora from the cave to give a taste we have never had before.” Seeing an opportunity, the farmer is selling the cheese
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2020’s Lessons Found
2020’s Lessons Found
With all its travails and gyrations, 2020 is a Lesson Found. It’s a matter of what we do with those lessons. The first step in turning the 2020 quagmire into valuable lessons is an assessment. How did you and your company react to events? Did you continue along your pre-March path or adapt? What were the outcomes of the path you chose? Next comes learning through evaluation.
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Leading During Stressful Times
Leading During Stressful Times
The previous Lesson Found highlighted how being empathetic is a fundamental tool of leadership. How to do that is today’s Lesson Found. A client asked my advice about an “always” productive team member who lately was barely producing. His company has been 100% virtual since March but the client only recently started to notice the problem. The client tried talking to the employee but the situation was not changing.
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Increasing Morale & Productivity thru Empathy
Increasing Morale & Productivity thru Empathy
Could the “problem with millennials” be burnout? Why CEOs and owners should care is a Lesson Found. In a her 2019 article, Anne Helen Petersen identifies Millennials as the “Burnout Generation” due to the circumstances of their coming of age. Petersen, a Millennial herself, makes her case in great detail
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Clarifying the road ahead for CEOs & Owners
Clarifying the road ahead for CEOs & Owners
When you get into your car on frigid winter mornings, the warmth of your breath fogs the windshield. That fogged windshield offers us a Lesson Found on the current business environment. A few months after she bought it, I was driving my mother’s new car. I was distressed because I couldn’t clearly see out of the windshield. Everything seemed foggy. Then I turned in the direction of the rising sun and couldn’t see anything.
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Family Businesses: The Benefits & Traps
Family Businesses: The Benefits & Traps
How an iconic Chicago deli handled the onset of the pandemic offers an important Lesson Found about family businesses. A recent radio story made me crave a visit to Manny’s Cafeteria & Delicatessen to enjoy mouthwatering sandwiches as well as to support a family business doing the right thing. Manny’s kept their full staff of 43 on the payroll through the shutdown (and before PPP). When asked why, owner Dan Raskin explained “They’re our families, too.”
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Staying the Course With Your Strategy
Staying the Course With Your Strategy
I recently listened to a podcast on one country’s handling of the original SARS pandemic. How this virus was contained in 2003 offers us Lessons Found about business strategies. SARS-CoV, a coronavirus with origins similar to COVID-19, made its debut seventeen years ago. This “original” SARS was less contagious than COVID-19 and the outbreak was contained primarily to Asia. Singapore’s experience with SARS started when several travelers were hospitalized with the contagion. The virus spread quickly within and across hospitals. Assuming the virus was related to healthcare settings, the government developed a “containment and elimination” strategy
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Are you a “Leader” or a “Manager”?
Are you a “Leader” or a “Manager”?
I’ve recently found myself in discussions with CEOs and Owners about the difference between being a “leader” versus a “manager”. And that is the subject of today’s Lessons Found. According to Merriam-Websters, to “lead” is to “guide on a way especially by going in advance; to direct on a course or a direction.” This is in contrast to the definition of “manage”: “to handle or direct with a degree of skill such as to exercise supervisory direction of; to make and keep compliant.” Considering both at their extremes, leadership takes a broad, future-focused
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Hiring: Looking Beyond the Obvious
Hiring: Looking Beyond the Obvious
Did you know the inspiration for the N95 Mask was a molded bra cup? That is where today’s Lessons Found start. Sara Little Turnbull was an unlikely candidate to become one of the nation’s top industrial designers. With a flair for interior design, Sara Little (her preferred professional name) was an editor at House Beautiful magazine before forming her own company in 1958. At about the same time, she wrote an article, “Forgetting The Little Woman”, in which she took major manufacturers to task for ignoring end users when designing products. And the corporate giants of the time took notice. That is how she found herself in front of 3M’s all male executive team