Estimating Your Work Like Ferris Bueller

I live in the Chicago area and I love the city of Chicago.  As an extension, I love the movies based in Chicago.  From The Blues Brothers to The Untouchables to all of the National Lampoon Vacation movies (including that Marshall Field’s scene in Christmas Vacation),...

Why Do You Want to Work From Home?

Working from home is a growing trend in the business world.  In an effort to cut back on office space and other overhead costs, many companies have set up their employees with the technology they need to do their jobs in their home offices. The big issue that...

When Expectations and Reality Collide

A detour Sam was making good time. He was cruising down interstate 94 ahead of schedule to meet his daughter in college.  If he could keep up at this rate, he would be there by six o’clock to take her to dinner. And then it hit. He saw up in the distance that cars...

Pushing Too Hard and the Monkey’s Dilemma

Have you ever worked so hard that you didn’t get anything done? The elusive banana The monkey’s dilemma is a well known story about how hunters figured out a way to capture monkeys in the jungle.  They would place some food that appealed to monkeys, like peanuts or a...

Unnecessary Anxiety

During the late 1990s, then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan coined the term Irrational Exuberance to denote the absurdity of over-enthusiasm investors had regarding stocks – particularly dot-com stocks – at the time. Unnecessary anxiety A management approach...