Click Here to read Chapters 1-7 CHAPTER EIGHT – Culture of Innovation The younger man lifted his eyebrows and nodded, “Sure, I know how a flywheel works.” The old man continued. “The Four Pillars of Amazon accelerate each other to create a sort of flywheel that spins faster and faster with every innovation, every optimization […]

Here’s a link to that memo where the wizard made a similar point about the mind’s ability to find meaning in impressionistic language.

The Radio Ink column Richard Kuritz was praising was originally a Monday Morning Memo. Maybe you remember it. Fiction in Advertising Norman Rockwell was an illustrator of fiction. He never showed us America as it really was, but America as it could have been, should have been, might have been. His images caused an entire […]

CHAPTER ONE The car door closed and they were alone. As the old man backed down the driveway, the younger man spoke. “Thanks for doing this with me Poobah.” “It’s what Poobahs are for, Sunshine.” Nothing else was said until they were on the highway. A billboard announced “Starbucks 12 miles ahead.” The younger man […]

CHAPTER ONE The car door closed and they were alone. As the old man backed down the driveway, the younger man spoke. “Thanks for doing this with me Poobah.” “It’s what Poobahs are for, Sunshine.” Nothing else was said until they were on the highway. A billboard announced “Starbucks 12 miles ahead.” The younger man […]

CHAPTER ONE The car door closed and they were alone. As the old man backed down the driveway, the younger man spoke. “Thanks for doing this with me Poobah.” “It’s what Poobahs are for, Sunshine.” Nothing else was said until they were on the highway. A billboard announced “Starbucks 12 miles ahead.” The younger man […]

Do you want to see through the eyes of The Storm?

These Words of Wisdom from Orson Welles were sent to us by Morty Silber. Fascinating! It’s a clip from a 1960 interview from the BBC Monitor series in which Orson Welles talks about ‘Citizen Kane,’ one of the greatest successes in the history of Hollywood.

Morty Silber sent this to us with a note to “listen for the wisdom shared between 4:00 and 6:30.” The whole thing is worth watching, to be sure, but the 2 and 1/2 minutes starting at 4:00 are pretty fascinating. Citizen Kane was one of the biggest successes in the history of Hollywood.

Fiction in Advertising Norman Rockwell was an illustrator of fiction. He never showed us America as it really was, but America as it could have been, should have been, might have been. His images caused an entire generation to vividly remember experiences we never had. Rockwell showed us a fictional America and we believed in […]

CLICK HERE TO READ CHAPTERS 1 – 6 CHAPTER SEVEN – Flying Lemonade Stands “A few decades ago, a guy named Doug Spence decided to display – in wide open, unlocked showcases – every style of engagement ring in the world. And not just every style of ring, but every size and shape of center stone in each […]

Whittington’s no-frills version is above. The hit versions are below. Which do you prefer? The Richard Harris version, above, was the original HUGE hit. But Richard wasn’t really a singer. He was an actor. Sort of makes sense now, huh?  The really over-the-top comical version, though, was Donna Summers’ disco version, below. That’s right, I said […]

Click to make BIG.  Sunglasses courtesy of The Sunny Plumber, Ken Goodrich.

Click the image to make it BIGGER.  🙂

“Don’t need a Buddha head.” What are those 5 words telling us? Are we being warned that “need” is the antithesis of Zen? Are we being told that a desire to think like Buddha is the opposite of thinking like Buddha? “Don’t need a Buddha head?” Or are those 5 words a repudiation of Buddhist beliefs? […]

Richard’s One-Minute Devotion seemed especially poignant to the wizard and me last Tuesday because we have a friend who – the previous day, January 16 – located his birth mother after searching for her for 12 years. Richard Exley had no idea what had happened the previous day. I’ve never heard a minister make that particular point about […]

Whittington has a comment about the cake…  

Click the GOALS banner to advance. Click the image to make it BIGGER.  🙂 Sunglasses courtesy of The Sunny Plumber, Ken Goodrich.

Allison has a laugh in the Toad and Ostrich pub (Whittington’s office) when she hears the story of Daniel’s thermos (on the right) and the story of the little girl who had to help him open it. And this (below) is a video I thought you should see. The guy in the powder blue with the […]

When Vice-Chancellor Whittington couldn’t twist the cap off his coffee thermos, Claire Sylvestre – in her Hello Kitty t-shirt – came to his rescue with the required muscle. Brother James is in orange, behind.

After that first photo, the Princess stepped down from the porch to see a wider sky.

Princess Pennie stepped out the front door last week and snapped this photo of the sunrise from the porch of the house where she and the wizard and I live. The photo is unenhanced. The sky really did look like that.

This is my quest: to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far…

CLICK HERE to read Chapters ONE through FIVE CHAPTER SIX – Continuous Optimization “Sunshine, when you care about your customers and care about your employees and care about your suppliers and care about your investors, you can build a rocket ship while you’re flying it.” “Is caring the fuel that lets you fly?” “Caring is […]

Above is the terminus page. Below is Louie, Louie performed by taxi drivers in Mumbai, India.

 

CHAPTER ONE The car door closed and they were alone. As the old man backed down the driveway, the younger man spoke. “Thanks for doing this with me Poobah.” “It’s what Poobahs are for, Sunshine.” Nothing else was said until they were on the highway. A billboard announced “Starbucks 12 miles ahead.” The younger man […]

Art by Todd Goldman is always funny. Ask the Goog about him.

The wizard and Princess Pennie and I plan to visit Tor House (below) the next time we’re in California. It was home of poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962). “Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.” Yep. He was a dark one all right. Jeffers is not one of my favorite […]

“Poobah, you said I should read Sam Walton: Made in America by John Huey and Nuts!: Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success. Are there any other books I should read? “Well, I just finished a book about two guys on a road trip. I never did learn where the two were headed, why […]

Get ready for a whole day of rapid-fire, time-tested techniques presented in 15-minute segments that can be employed to grow your business.  You’ll have a notepad full of notes at the end of the day. (Or, if you’re not a note-taker, you’ll have a nifty yellow legal pad you can take home and, I don’t know, make paper airplanes […]

Election Results “From a psychological point of view, extreme fear and outrage are often projections. … Within public discourse, fears proliferate through a process of exchange. … Conservatives also like to spread fears about liberals, who respond in kind.” “Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he claimed, ‘In politics, what begins in fear usually ends […]

REMEMBER! If you proceed beyond this page – the terminus page, where I give you the BeagleSword –you’re likely to see sales pitches, political opinions, religious orientation, politically incorrect humor – there’s no telling what.  Bottom line: this is the end of the safe zone. Proceed at your own risk.

One year after his success in The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman couldn’t get a job playing a dead guy in a cowboy movie. No one believed he could act. So he put on a raincoat and took a chance at night in Central Park. This scene from his next movie, Midnight Cowboy, is one of the most […]

CLICK HERE to read Chapters 1-4 CHAPTER FIVE – Alignment of the Pillars “Sunshine, when you were looking at Sam Walton’s 10 Commandments, you said you felt Wal-Mart was still being guided by 2 of them, but that the company seems to have abandoned the other eight. Do you remember what those 8 had in common?” […]

Here’s the link to Chapters 1-3 CHAPTER FOUR – Customer Centric The younger man took a seat, placed his laptop on the table and immediately went to work. The old man carried two Ventis to the table, placed the jumbo marshmallow alongside the young man’s computer and quietly snapped a photo. The younger man never noticed. The old man […]

HERE’S THE LINK TO CHAPTERS ONE AND TWO CHAPTER THREE “Turn around and go back to that Starbuck’s, Poobah. They’ve got Wi-Fi and I want to use my laptop.” The old man took the next exit, looped under the overpass and headed back the way they had come. “Do you want me to start the […]

Here’s a link to Chapter One if you missed it. – Indy Beagle CHAPTER TWO “Sunshine, do you remember the four unifying principles of George Eastman?” “I remember one was, ‘Keep the price of the product low so the customer will find more uses for it,’ and another one was, ‘Listen to what the customer […]

CHAPTER ONE The car door closed and they were alone. As the old man backed down the driveway, the younger man spoke. “Thanks for doing this with me Poobah.” “It’s what Poobahs are for, Sunshine.” Nothing else was said until they were on the highway. A billboard announced “Starbucks 12 miles ahead.” The younger man […]

Lesson for the Cognoscenti: as his valediction, or toast, or blessing at the end of today’s MondayMorningMemo, the wizard said, “May you walk in fields of gold.” Some people will immediately recall those words from the 1993 song by Sting, but what about the majority who won’t recall that song? “Gold” is instanty associated with wealth and abundance. And […]

The Wizard is paying $45,000 to Wizard Academy (the same $15,000/day that every other organization has to pay for private Academy Classes) so the famous Wizard of Ads partners can gather from their homes around the world in March, 2017 for a 3-day partner meeting in the academy tower overlooking Austin, Texas. Thirty businesses will participate in Day 2 […]

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Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.

Image by MIKHAIL AND INESSA GARMASH