Wednesday, April 8, 2015

April: Spring has arrived (sort of)

Spring is coming, but slowly. At least I can walk on snow-free sidewalks even if I do still need to bundle up.

Paper revisions for the July GBATA conference have been made and the paper is sent. Conference registration complete; flight to Portugal and hotel reservations made. Now it's back to working on the book.

This month also draws me back into Hope with registration taking place for fall courses and managing wait list requests. My seminar will require a complete overhaul, not only because the book I used to use is now out of print, but because I've been asked to change from a T-R 80-minute class schedule to M-W-F 50-minutes. Not sure how a seminar class will work with 50 minute discussion periods, but I'll give it a try.

Nick came home for the Easter weekend and Alison & Scott came over for dinner on Sunday. 




It was great to have everyone all together, though Alison is not feeling great (she has a torn abdominal muscle that causes her pain). As far as she's concerned the baby can come any time and the sooner the better.










I have finished a first draft of my book! It's tentatively titled "Survival is the Ultimate Performance Measure: Management Practices of the Corporate Century Club."  I don't think I have enough information for a book - half of it is the list of U.S. companies over 100 years old - but if I do get a publisher interested, I will need to verify the nearly 1200 companies on the list. I feel good about getting it to this point regardless, plus I have something to report for how I spent the second semester of my sabbatical. Now I do daily Twitter posts on companies that are over 100 and look for information about them that might be interesting to add to the book. As a result, the book is looking more and more like information on individual old companies that help illustrate the longevity factors we identified in the research. It's possible that reading about real companies will interest people more than the research results.  We'll see.