I have a goal to write a post for the blog about once a week. For topics, I rely on my keen awareness of the world around me, my self-deprecating wit and the seemingly endless stream of idiots who pass through my world. Typically, the problem is not what to write about but rather, which thing to write about.  This week I had the following options:

 

1. My life as a fast talker. Not as in fast-talking salesman but as in there are so many ideas in my head I can’t get them out fast enough. My daughter Maggie, also the good kind of fast-talker told me this week that fast-talking is her least favorite personal characteristic. I am not a fan of slow talkers; I want them to get on with it.
2. The Best of the Worst Doesn’t Need a Trophy – Maggie, the fast talker, explained to me why a trophy from the silver bracket is stupid. And don’t even get her started on the second place trophy in the silver division, which makes the winner the second best of the worst. I could have drawn tons of business correlations on this topic. 
3. A Volunteer, aka patsy. I had a tome running around in my head about the frustrations of a particular business owner who is helping with a fund-raising project for one of her children’s sports team.

But the winner this week is: Seeing the Forest for the Trees

 

I wrote something recently about companies who were thriving in the recession. I used VistaPrint as an example. We work with quite a number of printing companies and some were not happy about the reference to VistaPrint which is curious because I made a conscious decision to use them for precisely the same reason  - because we work with so many printing companies. The printing industry is in a world of hurt right now. One third of the volume they used to print has migrated to digital forms of communication leaving the industry seriously over capacity and drowning in “red ocean” as they lower prices to stay afloat. (Side note: if you lower prices to drive volume but there is 1/3 less volume out there, what are the chances that you can actually drive volume? If you can’t find more volume, aren’t you worse off than when you started?)