Dive into the archives.
- The Corner Bank or Saturday Night Live?: Getting a Loan, Part 2
The saga of the business loan continues. The wise bank branch manager has explained to me that the bank is looking for any reason to turn down loans, “we’re now in the loan denial business.” So I thought I’d listen to her “creative” idea for securing small-business bank money. Just another neighborhood banking service. Here [...]
- Speaking Prose All Along…..
There’s that old story about the fella who discovers that he’s been speaking prose his entire life. That’s what I thought, suddenly, listening to the recently self-employed gentleman, despairing of his recent downsizing. I call him self-employed, though he would not yet admit it: because he’s now on his own. He’s smarting because the conditions [...]
- The Real Stressed Bank Test
My client was stressed. “The banks (or most of them) got a clean bill of health, “ he began. “The market is in a buying frenzy,” he continued. “Then why did my business loan just get denied?” He’d returned from a visit to his bank, the US branch of a famously solvent European outfit; and [...]
- Introducing the NYC Cooperative Building as a Multi-Family Business
The New York City Cooperative is a multi-family business. Assets from multiple families are invested into shares, bought and sold in a competitive market, and allocated for shareholder use, into discrete apartment units, represented by share holdings of varied size. The purpose of the Cooperative is to furnish a home for its shareholders. Secondarily, it [...]
- The First Feedback: Beginning Organizational Inquiry
Listening thoughtfully, the General Manager smiled and said to us, “I understand, now, what you provide is rather like psychotherapy for this organization.” My colleague and I had just presented our feedback to the managerial team. We had interviewed employees in a manner originally called, “a bit informal”, by the GM; but had delivered a [...]
- The Business of Family
Awash in information, we scan the headlines continuously, adjusting our ongoing visions of externalities upon which we depend: politics, economics, and shifts in the markets. We trust the fine attunement of our filtering capabilities to deliver a unified picture of the front pages we consume from multiple sources- sometimes print, sometimes tv, increasingly internet. Our [...]
- The Ghost of a Former Family Business
Business developments expand and contract in harmony with economic developments. From this vantage, the current recession might be likened not so much to the Great Depression, but to more generalized periods of economic contraction. Yet, just as the ghost of the Great Depression has become a media favorite with which all of us must now [...]
