Author: MKelley

  • Thoughtfulness and the System

    I’m living right now in Kiruna, Sweden, and the endless contrasts between the cultures, attitudes, and systems of Sweden and America afford me a wonderful chance to contemplate my opinions of things. This is a topic that rarely wears itself out, but there is one particular difference that highlights a choice that businesses must make—driving…

  • Secret Sauce

    Our least-kept secret is our processes, and it’s the only reason that we’re successful now and that we will be even more successful in the future. See, we do this thing called “checklists” that makes it really easy to get things done–you choose your task, and follow the checklist. There’s a checklist for payroll, there’s…

  • Just do it NOW!!!! (Or What I Learned from Observing my Wife)

    I thought I was being smart. See, I figured if I just waited for a while, their would be less effort spent on doing the dishes. You can pile them all up in one spot, and then you can batch-process the whole lot. And the clean dishes in the dishwasher? if you need ’em, just…

  • Focusing Stone

    I’m all over the place. I’ve got people calling me from all of my various clients asking me to help them with this-or-that, I have two clients waiting on proposals, I’m starting work on an unrelated building project, I have financial statements I’m cleaning up, I’m trying to be home with my wife and four…

  • Abstraction

    If you can abstract everything to be anything then nothing has meaning. –Zed Shaw

  • The Four Activities of an Administrative Team

    I often see the the office treated as some unwanted necessity. They’re viewed as the phone-answers, the mail-openers, and the go-fers. People refer to laying off people in the office as “cutting overhead.” It’s thought of as a group of uninspired people who only feel that they’ve done their job if they get in your…

  • A Crutch or a Platform?

    If you have a really dialed system in place, you don’t need excellent workers. McDonalds does it all the time: with unskilled workers from a huge variety of backgrounds, they can make the same Big Mac the same way every time. McDonalds realized early on that in order to scale in the fast food industry,…

  • Excel

    I don’t normally post links here, but this one is too good to miss: http://fortune.com/2013/04/17/damn-excel-how-the-most-important-software-application-of-all-time-is-ruining-the-world/ Gotta get your web app running!

  • Redundancy is good, resiliency is better

    As businesses grow, inevitable specialization occurs, where a certain process is done only by one person who is really good at it. This has its benefits. Now the charismatic guy with no possibility of being consistent isn’t responsible for budgets, but can concentrate on selling. Now the gal with the cutting sarcasm and a knack for numbers can concentrate on the bookkeeping instead of…

  • Learning vs Knowledge

    I’ll give you three people who have knowledge for one who has the ability to learn