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Recent Articles from David Sneed
Who wins if my best employee gets deported?
Life and business aren’t a zero-sum game that requires someone else to lose in order for me to win. Doing the “legal” thing may give us a slight edge on our bottom line, but the “right” thing makes us objectively better people and objectively better businesses.
Are the unemployment numbers a lie?
Every unit of measurement is arbitrary, but only a con-artist will try and change one of them—and it will always be to prove the point he is making.
Don't destroy an agency for doing its job
Blaming the EPA for a poor economy or a low stock price is like blaming the Small Business Administration (SBA) for the Space Shuttle disaster. Frankly, that isn’t their department.
Can your quality of life be measured on a spreadsheet?
Here’s what I don’t understand: Why are cities judged by the same metric as a for-profit corporation? Can quality of life be measured on a spreadsheet? I’m all for business, I own one, but should a city council be picking favorites based on projected revenue?
Why higher business taxes can be a good thing
Where did we get the notion that only lower taxes will stimulate a business to spend money? For me and people like me, it’s actually the opposite.
The Foxes are outfoxing all opponents, and here's why
We people-managers say the word teamwork a lot, and we take ourselves pretty seriously when we do. I wonder how many times we think about our own management skills when we do. Usually, we think about what THEY can do; not what WE can do.
Why soccer = real life
NFL wide receivers know when they won’t be getting the ball so they run three-quarter speed, and they play only half the game. NBA centers can be on a winning team even if they never make it past half court. When they get tired they come out for a spell. And they still get the big bucks because th...
Staying safe in your rolling office
If you’re anything like me, you get a lot of work done in the car. Remember 20 years ago, when ice-age technology had us looking for a payphone just to say we’d won the Johnson account? Now we pass that message along from the car – and update our LinkedIn profile and tweet about the idiot lady beh...
New captains: Don’t rock the boat
Has there ever been a new CEO who kept the firm in situ? Of course not, it’s hardly possible. He’d alter the gears in the smoothest ticking clock the moment he came aboard. The only point of having power is to wield it. At least that’s how it seems to work in practice. But in theory, isn’t the opp...
The 3 percent scam
We’re going to go to the barber shop. And the hardware store, and the dry cleaner, and the local pizza joint—and we’re going to swipe 3 percent of that guy’s sales. It may not sound like much, but consider how many stores are within 20 miles of you. Three percent of all those sales equals a pretty...
The world’s smartest advertising
We got a mailer at our house a couple months ago from a stand-alone ER center in Arvada. If we came in to say hello, the ad said, they would give us a 72-piece first aid kit. It was on the way to my daughter’s school, so I stopped. I go through Band-Aids like a second-grader through scotch tape, s...
The world’s most loyal customers
I was at a movie theater the other day, and a young guy ahead of me got $2 off his ticket for showing his VA card. So guess what I did? As an ex-Marine, I saved $2, too, that’s what. And you’re looking at a guy who feels guilty grabbing a free doughnut because someone else might need it more. Soun...
