Jim Thomason's "The Business of People"

This shouldn't be a long epistle of a blog post. The princples are simple and straightforward and go something like this: 1. We should be dressed professionally every day at work. 2. You can wear casual clothing items and still look professional. 3. You can wear professional clothing items poorly and still look sloppy. 4. Overly revealing clothes never look professional unless you're a dancer. 5. You never know which minister, author, or customer you're going to run into. Nobody tied you up, threw you in the trunk, and made you work here. You came to the Bible Company and asked for a job. When you get dressed in the morning make sure to remember where you work. Central Parking's customers probably don't care how CP's people dress: ours do. HCA's content providers, their doctors, probably don't care if their receptionists are half dressed. Our content providers, our authors, more than likely do. Remember where you work. It really is that simpl...

You can't turn on the television and avoid hearing opinions about how our economy came to its current state. And while it is true that speculation in real estate was rampant, fueled by poor lending practices and irresponsible buyers, there's a deeper root cause; we don't make much in the way of physical products anymore, and we don't really want to. Two days ago in the New York Times David Brooks called this out wonderfully. In his Op Ed piece, "The Genteel Nation" Brooks points out that our change in thinking has given us "Great Britain disease" leading to the decline of our empire like that of our mother country centuries ago. His thesis is dead-on; like Great Britain before us, we built our economy making things. We applied scientific knowledge of primary industries, and society's best and brightest engaged in those endeavors. Now 65% of graduates from the nation's top schools go into law, finance or consulting. This isn't the fir...

We are 34 days away from move-in day at our new Live Events headquarters in Plano, TX. Just saying that, much less writing it, makes me catch my breath because there is a lot yet to be done. It is in Scott Holloway's capable hands, however, so I have every confidence that it will be (like all his projects) on-time and on-budget. We meet on this project weekly and I came across some information today that might help answer an age-old question within the company: "Why does office furniture cost so much more than I can buy it at retail?" This is a question that comes up every project: why, for instance, does a good cubicle-grade desk chair cost $500 when you can buy them at Office Depot for $300 or less. Okay, here's why... You don't sit in your home office chair 8 hours a day for years at a time. We have some $300 chairs in our company, and our experience with them is that they must be replaced about every three years. That's $100/year for usage. The...