I recently stumbled across this old article from Harvard Business Review written by none other than Michael Porter and some of his Harvard colleagues, containing some important lessons for CEOs that are new to the role:

First, as a new CEO you must learn to manage organizational context rather than focus [...]

Africa is one of the richest continents in terms of natural resources, yet most of it is steeped in poverty. In the third world countries there are many basic things needed as a priority over Internet infrastructure (like food, water, shelter), however in a “semi-first-world” country like South Africa, the economy would benefit immensely from [...]

If you run email campaigns, this is a good example of how to structure a good email. Why?
They have managed to articulate their value proposition very clearly with no unnecessary waffle.

It articulates what their product (social software) could do (used as a strategic resource to create a new market and product category)
It provides some evidence [...]

Here is a really good presentation from Kevin Perlmutter of Interbrand on customer experience and the factors that directly impact revenue generation.

The orginal can be viewed and downloaded from the Interbrand site

This is pretty useful and I can never remember the exact syntax, so here it is for me (and now you) to remember.
In a Google spreadsheet, you can do an online currency conversion that looks up the exchange rate in real time, making my life much easier.
For example to get EUR to GBP just type
=googlefinance((”CURRENCY:EURGBP”))
(note: [...]

One of the things I often need to do is to calculate the number of work days between 2 dates in order to calculate billable days. There is a very useful function called NETWORKDAYS which does exactly this. It works the same in both Excel and Google Spreadsheets
The syntax is =NETWORKDAYS (start_date, end_date, [holidays])
example =NETWORKDAYS [...]

Same article, 2 different ads that rotated in the ad space. It shows the massive difference that simplicity and context makes…
First the full article…

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Ad 1…

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Ad 2…