A series on the Faithlife core values: Honesty. Openness. Awesomeness. Growth. Initiative. Elegance. Shipping. We live in world of quality products. Where it is unusual to repair a product, because products either rarely fail, or are so cheap that when they do we simply purchase a newer, better model for less than the cost of repair. …
Author Archives: bobpritchett
Read for Cash
Our “continuing education” program for employees can be summed up in one word: read. Every year we pay our team to read business books. The financial incentive (15 cents / page) and requirements (the books are all pre-approved, the campaign lasts six weeks) lead people to read outside their normal interests and outside their normal …
Almost Perfect
I read Almost Perfect, the story of WordPerfect Corporation, years ago, and have used the story of ‘the minor change that wasn’t worth testing before release’ many times. “On Friday the 13th there were so many people trying to call us that our busy signals brought down the entire AT&T 800 system in the Mountain West. The phones …
What we value at Logos
A recent email to the company… There is nothing at Logos more important than our corporate values: Honesty. Openness. Awesomeness. Growth. Initiative. Elegance. Shipping. These values reflect what we want to be as an organization. They help us decide what to do today and next year. They answer both ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ I love being …
Advice to my 21 year-old self
An intern invited me to coffee today and asked what advice I’d give my 21 year-old self. The answer was easy: read more history and biography. As the saying goes, “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.” The only shortcut I’ve found is to study other people’s experience, and that’s mostly written …
Entourage
I was reading an article about a famous, wealthy person. The reporter noted that he was surrounded by an entourage, some of whom seemed employed only to laugh at his jokes. It reminded me that the Bible addressed this (and everything!) long ago: logos.biblia.init(); (Note the cool new embedded Bible widget! You can get it …
What is love?
No matter how familiar the passage, I never tire of seeing and hearing it another way. This video by the amazing Fred Sprinkle is the latest, and one of the best. (Click the image to see the full video!)
Printed books freeze the Zeitgeist
I came across this interesting criticism of a project to continually update a 1907 dictionary in a new online edition: More importantly, and this is my real issue, the online-only presence of The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology means that we lose Zeitgeist, an important historical insight that we won’t see for decades, perhaps centuries down the line. … …
Everything changes but people
Over thousands of years we have learned that people never change but that our culture and circumstances – technology, buildings, tools, communications, transportation, etc. – change constantly. Yet when people make big plans (or worse, write big laws or found ambitious non-profits) they get things backwards: from their good intentions and future vision they extrapolate …
Advice to a young CEO
What’s the best advice for a young, first-time CEO? Get rid of your television It sounds silly, but you’re going to need every moment of every day, and television is a distraction you can’t afford. Read business history and biography Remember the old saw about how good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from …