Luca Pacioli, an Italian mathematician and Franciscan friar, is widely known as the "Father of Accounting" for publishing 36 chapters on the double-entry accounting method used by Venetian merchants during the Italian Renaissance. His book, Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (which translates, "Everything about Arithmetic, Geometry and Proportion"), was written as a textbook for students in Northern Italy at the end of the 15th century. Pacioli's documentation of double-entry accounting and ledgers taught entrepreneurs of the day how to conduct business using timely and accurate financial information, and it established the fundamentals of accounting still practiced today.

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Do you know what’s changed the most in business over the last 30 years? It’s not computers. Or phones. Or travel. Or technology. It’s business coaches. Business coaches didn’t exist thirty years ago. At least not the way they exist now. Oh I’m sure there were some super rich executives in the 1970’s living in LA and snorting cocaine who thought it would be a great status thing to have a “business coach” at their side to impress their friends. But nowadays everywhere you look there’s a “coach”. Read more...

As we move into 2011, we see the economy picking up and businesses starting to grow their teams, it's important to recognize the effect emotions have on performance and consequently the bottom line. In fact, higher Emotional Intelligence (EI/EQ) has been positively correlated with increased employee engagement, lower turnover, and improved job performance. The core attributes for success in today's workplace.

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Let’s assume you are too young to remember (or to have heard about) the 1938 infamous broadcast by Orson Wells based on the novel by H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds. Although the radio broadcast took place on Halloween, it could have easily been an April Fool’s Day prank. What made the broadcast so believable was the format; it involved a series of news bulletins detailing the invasion of planet Earth by Martians.  The broadcast led to varying degrees of public panic during the transmission followed by even more uproar afterwards. It took several days to debunk the prank since we didn’t have Twitter or newsfeeds to instantly clarify what was real and what was not. Orson Well’s prank could be viewed as an early example of a social media virus run amuck. Read more...