It’s the 27th day of the month—only three workdays left in the quarter and you are under quota. Now you’re scrambling to close those few opportunities in your pipeline just to get that pending bonus. But your prospects instantly smell blood in the water and ask for another 10% discount in order to close tomorrow… [...]

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By just about any metric you can use, Spain is not doing well right now. Nearly 27% of the country is unemployed, their GDP continued to shrink in the last quarter, they have a credit squeeze that keeps interest rates far above the euro average and keeps new businesses from opening, and there are further [...]

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I can no longer count the number of times I’ve heard someone say that, “Social media is a waste of time in business.” This is just not true. People who don’t want to adapt certainly have that right, but my philosophy is that I want to have the best prospecting tools in my arsenal. LinkedIn [...]

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The latest episode of the “Consider This!” podcast is out; let’s talk politics in 10 minutes or less. In this episode, I have a one-track mind. In the President’s State of the Union address, he proposed increasing the minimum wage by about 25% to $9 an hour, as though this will somehow defeat poverty. The fact is, [...]

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There was a big story by National Geographic last week about illegal ivory being used by Philippino Catholics to make statues. They even named one of our more dubious priests as being involved in the practice. Corruption is not new in the Philippines, where winking at the law is a way of life and bribes [...]

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Last week I wrote about a fascinating new product in America’s war on obesity, known as LifeSize.  This nifty little product from a start-up company is starting to garner quite a bit of attention. The New York Times did a piece on it. So did the Huffington Post. Newsmax picked up the story. Now the [...]

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The idea that in the world of Commerce Chief Executives might follow the lead of Harry S Truman and have a sign on their desks saying “The Buck stops here” has had something of a boost in recent times.The departure of top bankers from RBS (Fred Goodwin) and Barclays (Bob Diamond) and top oil men [...]

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Those of us who supported some kind of government health care bill for the 38 million uninsured were duped. Our hope was that a government program could help some who lack health insurance (or the underinsured who would go bankrupt if they had a health emergency). These folks would now have a safety net for [...]

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I think  those who live and work in the US for x number of years without papers should get an amnesty, as was done by Reagan, and I support the targeted amnesty by Clinton for refugees from countries where their lives were in danger if returned, but the blanket amnesty by President Obama for illegal [...]

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Most Americans know about the “Asian Tiger” economies (and if PNoy keeps hitting at corruption, the Filipinos may join that group). But did you know that other areas of the world are similarly expanding their economies? A day or two ago, I ran into an article that those “undocumented” immigrants in the US are now [...]

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The calamity of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster continues to put corporate reputation as a subject very much in the spotlight and, hardly surprisingly, many commentators contrast BP’s past attempts to claim the moral highground on environmental matters with the stark reality of what happened in the Gulf of Mexico. The idea that corporations should be [...]

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I see the “Occupy Wall Street” folks are still there. But what is puzzling me: usually a movement starts with a few activists and then slowly grows, as more who believe the same things join. So exactly how many are in these rallies? We know who is in the rallies: From Fastcompany.com via the Democratic [...]

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  By John Donovan of RoyalDutchShellPlc.com Today we provide a unique insight into the shadowy world of Shell Corporate Security, formerly known as “CAS” – Shell Corporate Affairs Security. Shell has had advance sight of everything you are about to read and therefore the opportunity to challenge authenticity of the featured CAS Intel Summary, correct [...]

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When my kids were in high school, I lived in a small Pennsylvania coal town, we had an excellent library. Why? Because a lot of kids of the coalminers wanted to go to college, and so the beloved “Library Lady” would try to keep up on textbooks, classics, encyclopedias, and other literature needed by the [...]

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The ecosystem in the Philippine island of Palawan is unique, and to make it worse, the island has only recently been cleared of terrorists and reopened for tourism, so there is worry that the terrible scars from mining will destroy tourism too. A couple months back, a reporter and civic leader was assassinated because he [...]

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In a previous post, I joked that if the Governor of Wisconsin wanted to fire all his teachers, he could hire a lot of qualified Filipino teachers to replace them. Yet this is not quite a joke: The cut backs in US medical training have resulted in the active importation of foreign medical graduates to [...]

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I love how Tom Friedman in the NYTimes lectures his US readers on “how the Chinese see us” by relating a skit on China’s government owned TV station where children were taught to ridicule the US: China’s CCTV aired a skit showing four children… getting ready to run a race. Before they take off, the [...]

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The naive guys at the NYTimes Freakonomics blog have a short article on the cost of health care, especially medicines, in third world countries: A new study analyzed the effects of buying four basic prescription drugs in “low- and middle-income countries,” and the results aren’t pretty. “Buying brand name amoxicillin, for example, would push an [...]

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Unlike the US, where our priests would rarely preach about anything more serious than “Jesus loves you”, here in the Philippines, our clergy is politically active. And one of the latest campaigns in our district is to oppose a local casino. So the sermon in our church this week was “No to Casinos, No to [...]

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Up popped a comment on my Facebook page: American Medical News Do you think your practice is, or will be, ready for meaningful use? Uh, silly me. True, I’m now retired, but I though that seeing 20 plus patients a day, diagnosing their ills, ordering their treatment, and (often) listening to their woes and advising [...]

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A bit of an uproar in Massachusetts, where the local papers have discovered that Senator Kerry bought a yacht, but has parked it in nearby Rhode Island to get out of paying the local sales tax. The good news is that, now that he has been caught and shamed, he will pay the half million [...]

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The large American Federal Bureaucracy was founded to replace the “spoils system” that allowed those elected to place all their friends/relatives/cronies/campaign contributors into offices where they could then go on to help their friends/neighbors/relatives/cronies. The idea was to make bureaucrats non political, and represent the people and follow the regulations rather than to promote a [...]

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A couple weeks ago, I ran across a strange story about Zimbabwe: a couple of known terrorists were caught crossing the border from Zimbabwe into South Africa at Beitbridge. 33 year-old Imran Muhammad…was arrested last Sunday while trying to get through Beitbridge border post to South Africa on what officials believe was a fake Kenyan [...]

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The British media and commentariat is working itself into a frenzy over President Obama’s attack on BP. The Mayor of London, the patrician Boris Johnson, has said “I do think there’s something slightly worrying about the anti-British rhetoric that seems to be permeating from America … when you consider the huge exposure of British pension [...]

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I was bemused when a minor lambast against “pacifists” trying to start a war against Israel led to this comment: “…the Israelis steadfastly refuse to publish a list of allowed goods and appear to change their minds daily on what is allowed. Eg. Hair conditioner is banned at the moment…” Oh my, no wonder the [...]

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The CFPA Bill, known as “financial reform”, is very likely to pass. Lenders of all varieties will have business models scrutinized once the CFPA gets up and running. You can bet that under the Obama Administration, subprime lenders from auto financiers to pawn shops to payday lenders will be shot on sight. This will be [...]

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Just when I think I’m through dishing the United States of Real Estate, it pulls me back in. The show is old, but still too hot to ignore. In mid-April the Klown Execs From Washington Mutual (WaMu) reunited on a DC stage, wowing the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations with a blazin’ rendition of their [...]

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If you want a controversial ex politician to give a talk to your group, do you expect that person to will fly unaccompanied in coach, find a taxi to your site, and stay at Motel 6? Or do you think that the politician will ask for a decent airline flight (first class, for security reasons, [...]

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My fellow Family docs: Did you know that you are now officially part of the Obama organizing machine? In the AAFP news: Physicians need to be closely involved as the recently enacted health care reform legislation begins to take effect, according to AAFP President Lori Heim, M.D., of Vass, N.C. “It is the implementation of [...]

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I have many ethical problems with the Obama Health Care bill. But the real story that is being ignored about Obama’s health care bill is that it kowtows to big insurance and big drug companies, who stand to make a killing from the bill. Reuter’s review of “winners and loser” should give you pause: hospitals [...]

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