Because I’ve been neck-deep in a consulting gig these last three weeks, I’ve little time for what matters, let alone leafing through all the reading material piling up neck deep in my kitchen. So I just got around this afternoon to leafing through last week’s Forbes magazine and there in living color is reason number [...]

At the Church of Scientology, every disciplinary write-up is proceeded by a knock-down.

. . . you do not talk about fight club.
The Shoestring Venture first anniversary retrospective of Top Ten Bizarre Business Stories of 2009 begins, appropriately enough, with a manager that makes your boss look wonderful. Really. Tell me about the worst boss you’ve [...]

The Shoestring Venture blog is celebrating its first birthday! We have gone from zero to thousands of readers and had a walloping good time getting there.
In celebration, for the next couple weeks we’re going to get all nostalgic on you and highlight some of the highlights over the last year — the most popular, most [...]

. . . have you ever wondered what a marathon is like?
Come on, you know you’ve heard the expression a thousand times. “Running a business” or “starting a business” “is a marathon, not a sprint.” And you nod your head in agreement as if somebody has actually said something sensible. But outside of the fact [...]

Any food will do. Like spam, for instance.

Over the past three months, we here at Shoestring Venture have been damn-the-burritos-full-speed-ahead in social networking and marketing. Business, as you all know, is a school of hard knocks and, I can tell you feelingly, social marketing is a class where the hard knocks rain down like a [...]

The Post Office makes most of its money from junk mail. So why not junk trucks? Junk post offices?

In further evidence that “Richard needs a life,” the USPS inspector general has a fascinating blog today (yes, the U.S.P.S. inspector general has a blog — tagline (I’m not joking): “pushing the envelope” (*grooooooan*) — and, as [...]

That is one tiny ad.
But it gets bigger when you click it.

This has to be some sort of Guinness world record. The New York Times Web edition this morning opened up with the tiniest banner ad I’ve ever seen. Even the Lollipop Guild will probably think this a mighty teensy ad. At around 90 pixels [...]