Day 105 of the NBA lockout came and went as many of the previous 104 before it had: without any meetings between the NBA and NBPA. But also like many of those previous 104 days, the most significant news was a loose statement made by one of the chief particulars. This time it was the Commish stepping to the mic to offer an outlook thinly veiled in disappointment: if no deal is reached by this upcoming Tuesday, games through Christmas Day could very well be cancelled. That just happens to coincide with a planned meeting of the owners and the players face-to-face. (The one change to previous meeting is that there will be mediation involved in this round of banter, though that guarantees nothing as far as an agreement is concerned.) This of course follows the pattern laid out by the Commish last week that if no deal was reached by this past Monday, the… [Read more]

Once in awhile I’ll get an invite to a social mix-and-mingle type event. The goal of course is to provide a nice, friendly atmosphere to talk business with yuppies over drinks. Going into these things I automatically know that I’ll be wasting my time. A fine example of the time waste is the iPhone craze that occurred during the latter half of the 2000’s. During this iPhone craze, I had many people coming up to me saying “Hey, Greg, let’s make an iPhone app.” I knew that I was meant to be the one doing the coding since these people coming up to me weren’t coders,  and would not want to do it even if they could. So you probably think, if I’m the creator, then they’ll provide the ideas, right? So I ask “What’s your idea?” “Oh, I don’t know. Do you have any?” What the hell is that? So, I’m expected to come… [Read more]

Now, if it’s one thing that you learn early on in business, it’s that there are people that walk the walk and those that talk the talk. The talkers are many and the walkers are few and far between. Mostly, what you get is a ton of wannabes and posers. Now, these wannabes and posers, they will congregate, make themselves feel good, and share ideas that hardly ever go anywhere. A lot of these ideas are very unoriginal or aren’t very good. I like to use an analogy for them, I call them spinning tops, if you’ve ever seen a top when you pull it’s string, it’ll set in and spin, and spin, and spin. You could pull the string harder or faster but the most it’ll do is just spin faster without really going anywhere. Now, if you manage to tip that top over, it’ll actually gain some velocity and start moving. This is… [Read more]