Category Archives: Marketing

In 2004, Leeward Bean was happily retired. He’d helped build a scientific instrument company, Ocean Optics, and sold it for $50 million. But when a pair of former employees, Christina Bacon and Ron DeFrece, pitched him on an online novelty shop called Uniquely Geek, the science nerd couldn’t resist: He agreed to give them seed funding and advice. And soon enough, this little side project would spawn an entire new business for him. It all began when he stopped into Uniquely Geek’s south-Florida office one day; the staff had just written 100 nerdy slogans for T-shirts, and wanted to print them all. “I said, bless your heart, you can’t do that,” remembers Bean. It would be a nightmare — meeting a silk screener’s minimum order for each design, finding space to store it all. Nope. Can’t happen. The geeks’ response: “Figure it out!” Read More

A lot of people assume that Warren Buffett’s investment strategy is a big secret – but it’s really not a secret at all.

In fact, Buffett’s investment criteria has been included in the beginning pages of every single Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report since 1982: Read More

Google appears to be planning to test its Project Loon internet balloons across the entire US, according to recent documents filed with the FCC.

The company has asked the Federal Communications Commission for a license to test experimental radios that use wireless spectrum in the millimeter bandwidth in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Google said it wants to begin the tests on January 1 for a period of 24 months. Read More

40 years ago, she was a struggling computer programmer for AT&T in Philadelphia.

Today, she is the only woman on the President’s Management Advisory Board. How did Gail McGovern, CEO of American Red Cross, manage to get there? And what can we learn from her?

Here are five of the watershed moments that helped her reach the top, edited from “Before I Was CEO,” my upcoming book on lessons from leaders. Read More