As I mentioned in an earlier post, I spent the weekend doing tearing out carpetting from our house and understanding the electrical and plumbing systems. A couple of our plans needed to change once we really got into the house: Need a new subfloor in the bathroom & entryway May need to re-wall the bedroom …
Author Archives: Garrick van Buren
Legalizing Feng Shui
Last month Assemblyman Leland Yee introduced a bill in the California legislature to put Feng Shui principles on the books. State officials were speechless “We know earthquakes knock down buildings, we know fire burns down buildings. We don’t know what feng shui does to buildings.” As Assemblyman Yee responded, “A lot of the principles of …
Learning from Living
Over breakfast this Saturday, my wife and I discussed various home improvement projects for our new place. Very early into the conversation, we realized how little we knew about the house. What’s under the carpet? Can the toilet be moved easily? How long will it take to remove the wallpaper? Answers that can only be …
Veen’s Presentation Tips
I highly recommend Jeffrey Veen’s Seven Steps to Better Presentations My personal favorites: #3 Don’t Apologize. Apologizing for your own performance so directly and swiftly weakens. #4 Start Strong and #5 End Strong. I was in a sales presentation recently where the main presenter apologized 5 times in as many minutes. From the audience’s perspective …
Lunch is the Most Important Meal – Redux.
As a follow-up to my earlier post on lunches, I submit this announcement from Duluth, MN’s mayor Herb Bergson. Bergson plans to visit one classroom each Friday and take a tourist to lunch that day. He also wants to meet with different small-business owners each Friday to see how the city can help them grow. …
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Lunch is the Most Important Meal
In my experience observing organizational behavior, especially start-ups, what happens at lunch is a key indicator of an org’s health. If people go out, for a walk, and talk about non-work stuff – Congrats. If they brown-bag it and eat alone at their desks – something is very, very wrong Laurent Bossavit agrees with me …
March 11, 2002
Finished reading the The Adrian Mole Diaries over the weekend. Ahhh, to be an oblivious, self-involved teen again. It really took me back. The formal English, as it often does, amplified the humor. Not such a complementary view of Americans, but I could relate to it also. It took me 2/3 of the book to …