James VanDyke Blog

Category Archives: Business

Results Only Work Environment

By james | April 27th, 2009

In 2006 Business Week magazine published an article entitled, “Smashing the Clock.” The article detailed electronics retailer Best Buy and a new work environment they were promoting – Results Only Work Environment (ROWE). The basic premise is companies and workers are tied to a old mind set of a forty hour work week. The mind [...]

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Only the Best – The Concept

By james | February 8th, 2009

Have you ever walked into a consumer electronics store only to be overwhelmed by all of the choices? I have. You want to spend your money wisely.  But,  this sea of products seems to ensure you can never be certain about your purchase.  If you’re like me, you probably walk away from your purchasing experience [...]

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Coming up with an idea

By james | January 1st, 2009

My first task for my “Starting a Business” class was to think of a business I wanted to work on for the entire semester. I brainstormed for about a week and half about potential ideas. I found the most useful formula for plausible ideas came from combining three things: Something I’m interested in Something I [...]

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Up Coming Series: A Business Plan

By james | December 31st, 2008

I’m getting an MBA at night and this past semester I took a class called Starting a Business. The bulk of our work focused on writing a business plan for a theoretical business that we might start. Since I put a good deal of work into the class I thought I would share over the [...]

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Royal Caribbean: Not so bad in the end

By james | April 16th, 2008

A few months ago I wrote a post about Royal Caribbean adding a fuel supplement to our cruise bill after we made our reservation and paid a deposit. For this I called them out as a bad company. Well a few weeks ago they decided they were wrong and revised the fuel supplement. Now people [...]

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You should know what your co-workers earn

By james | March 9th, 2008

Companies are artificially secretive about their accounting to internal audiences. Typically granular information about a company’s books is not available to it’s employees and only a small precentage of the company knows exactly how the company is earning and spending money. I offer this suggestion. Be completely transparent about your company’s spending including how much [...]

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