Recent Articles from Pat Wiesner
Where do the really good people go to work?
Sometime in the early nineties, we decided that we were causing some of our own problems because we weren’t training our own salesmen. Business was good and growing, but we wanted to make our team better. So for 10 or so years we ran classes and asked everyone who attended to rank, in order of […]
Rough road for the children of Central America
In 1998, Hurricane Mitch clobbered Honduras. With more than 15 hours of winds in excess of 155 knots, Mitch ripped through the middle of the country, destroying almost 80 percent of the bridges and roads. Hundreds of thousands of homes were destroyed. The death toll was estimated somewhere around 11,000, but the real number will […]
The best advice I ever received came from a former boss
With college and a little bit of grad school behind me, I struck out in 1958 to “seek my fortune,” as they say. I had a degree in physics but I didn’t want to spend my days in a lab, so I figured being a sales engineer would be a happy medium. The best salesmen […]
Dr. Oz and a happy company
My wife often watches Dr. Oz on the kitchen TV, so, like it or not, I end up listening to him, too. Even though I would probably deny being a “fan,” I have to admit that he is a very interesting fellow in the way he approaches health from the “you are what you eat” […]
Can you get the best work out of the people you manage?
Whether they number in the thousands or just a handful, encouraging your team to produce at full throttle is tough to achieve because you have to enjoy the process along the way. When I start thinking about this problem, I recall the best boss I ever had. Why do I think that he was so great? His n...
From just over the hill: Today is always the beginning
One thing I can claim without challenge is that I have been around business for a long time. I had my first job in 1951 as a soda jerk in Benson’s drugstore in Buffalo, N. Y.; the first president I remember is FDR, and the first one I voted for was JFK. My first real […]
Perspective: Like yesterday
From the beginning, we had tough people who loved the magazine, loved to report and loved to dig out the “story,” whether it was about Denver being the center of the penny stock business and how you could get upside-down quick when your stock went from 2 cents to 1 cent; or about the problems and...
On Management: A view of the U.S.
The airport in Madrid is a lot bigger than I expected and a lot older, too, providing miles of rough going for the wheels guiding your baggage along with stairways that should have been escalators. It was a long trek to the baggage claim and the exit while horsing four difficult bags along, all the […]
On Management: How your team measures you
After 50 years of being managed and managing, this is what I learned you must do as a manager to earn loyalty and get a person’s best work: You mustρ Understand the difference between management and leadership. You manage things, you lead people.ρ Be a leader who creates an atmosphere of approval and acceptance and high expectations […]
On management: The people part of business
When Wiesner Publishing was about one month old, we decided we needed to move from the house to an office, which we rented on the second floor of Littleton Electric. The “we” was me and my wife, Janet (who would work on the development of our circulation lists using a new computer I bought, the […]
On management: Where do you go after you blow through your startup money?
Out of work, a 45-year-old consultant (read: engineer without a job), in the beginning funnel of what would become a deep recession, with something like $3,000 in the bank, three kids in college and a keen desire to be in my own business. Sounds like the conditions of today. But this was me in 1981 when […]
On management: Small-company financing
Sometime in the next few months I will retire fully and maybe take up writing in a different mode. I have to quit writing about business and sales and marketing because I’m not in the thick of it anymore, and so I don’t get as much new material as I used to. Perhaps I’ll try […]