The EQ Journal Blog

June 2010

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
« May				Jul »
	1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Archives

Star Trek Film Predictor

Can We Predict How Many Star Trek Films Will Have Been Released by 2050?
[Note: we also include (in one of the postscripts) a projection for the no. of Bond films that will be released between 2010 and 2100. See below.]
Well, we have a good data sample available to us which should permit some reasonable predictions [...]

Lease-to-Own

More Complicated that It Looks
As a response to the toughening of mortgage rules in North America and the collapse of individual credit ratings, more people, who want to fully participate in their national economies as homeowners, are going to turn to Lease-to-Own opportunities. On the surface this looks attractive to both investors and to renters.
For [...]

Show a Little Humility

I was thinking the other day about how fiendishly complex the ecology of this planet is. It reminded me again of why it is important for humans to be a bit humble in the face of many unknowns.
Just when we think experts have a thing figured out, new evidence appears that upsets accepted wisdom.
Here [...]

Student Buys Her Own Home

With Just $4,500
It can still be done. That is, young people can still buy a home with little money down, pay less than they did when they were renting, participate in real estate returns (inflation, forced savings and imputed rents) and get a stake in their society through home ownership.
Here is the story of one [...]

Tips on How to Negotiate and Sell

Plus a few Lessons from Neuro Linguistic Programming, NLP
I am not sure which is the single most important thing for an entrepreneur to do but probably the two most important are:
1. SELL, SELL, SELL.
2. CHECK, CHECK, CHECK.
You cannot really be a successful entrepreneur unless you can sell and negotiate effectively.
Obviously, you have to be able to [...]

Entrepreneur’s Venn Diagram

What does it take to create a successful, large-scale entrepreneurial organization? Can you stock it exclusively with rebels who bring a great deal of creative energy to it? What if, instead, you have top-down military style leadership? People who are real doers. Will that work? Or how about having a lot of order takers [...]

What You Need to Think about Before You Purchase a Home

A young couple recently asked me what they need to think about before they purchase their first property. In their case, they are posted overseas and are thinking of buying a townhome in Ottawa, partly as an investment and partly as a backup plan for when they do return to Ottawa.
Here is what I told [...]

Should Ottawa Allow Chickens in Residential Areas?

To find out the answer to that question, I asked someone who has experience in the matter—my son, Andrew, who lives in Canberra (Australia).
I asked him how his neighbours reacted to his hen house in their quiet suburban neighbourhood. Were they opposed? Here’s his answer:
“Quite the opposite the neighbours delighted in it. One neighbour would [...]

Delivering Profitability—A Review of Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh’s New Book

For the first three quarters of my advance copy of the book Delivering Happiness (Hachette Books, June 2010, http://www.deliveringhappinessbook.com) by Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh (pronounced ‘Shay’), I felt like this was going to be the 3rd book I have ever read that, if I could have, I would have been its author. The other [...]

Differentiated Value: Boosting Sales Success, Gross Profit and Efficiency

There is no doubt that if a business can not differentiate itself from its competition, it is in trouble. Differentiated Value (DV) together with quantity produced will result in more dollars for an organization.
We could express this in an equation as follows:
DV x q ≡ $.
Let’s look at an example of how this might [...]