Join Blue Shampoo, the only improv troupe in Chicago to feature me as a member, in a fundraiser improv show on Thursday, January 17. Doors open at the Gorilla Tango Theatre at the corner of Milwaukee and Western in Chicago (just off the Western Blue Line stop) at 9 pm and the show starts at 9:30 pm. See Blue Shampoo perform and possibly some special guests. Tickets are only $10 and can be purchased online.

This show is a fundraiser as Blue Shampoo has been selected to perform at the Dirty South Improv Festival in North Carolina in February. Of course it costs money to get there, and funds raised will to go towards the costs of traveling south and spending a week outside of Raleigh.

So here’s your chance to see some amazing talent on the small stage, and me too! I will be at the fundraiser but won’t be going to the festival, but I wish I was. If you cannot attend but would still like to support our fundraising, consider buying a ticket or two online?

Hope to see you there!

Diversions • (0) Comments • Permalink

At the New Years Eve party I attended someone mentioned they want to start their own business, a retail store. The catalyst for this was a prime retail location becoming available. Of course I jumped on that topic, throwing as much encouragement as I could to fuel the spirit of entrepreneurship.

To no surprise, one item that came up in the dialogue was healthcare. I say to no surprise for whenever anyone contemplates striking out on their own, healthcare is always raised as a question – the great unknown of having health insurance. I would go as far as to say it is a concern greater than stable income!

But what if healthcare and health insurance was not an issue? Hypothetically, what if one did not have to worry about this, or have it as a barrier for going out on their own?

Now I am not proposing any type of solution to this issue. There are many parties involved here, not just the insurance companies and politicians. And if you are a regular reader of The Hot Iron, you will know my bias towards capitalism!

As we head into the weekend, here’s a “what if” to ponder. Feel free to share any thoughts in the comments to this post.

Business • (2) Comments • Permalink

January 2, 2008 marks the 1 year since my first post on The Hot Iron titled Communication and Resolution. Well, my very first post was my test Hello World post a couple days earlier on December 30, 2006, as I set a goal to get the blog setup and running by the end of ’06. In either case, the world has had the opportunity to read The Hot Iron for a year.

And what a year it has been! Where I set out to write on topics swirling in my mind on business and technology, I added book takeaways, a focus on domain names and took several tangents, many inspired by surroundings here in the Windy City. The Hot Iron is my personal blog, though it generously took on the same template as the Web site for my Internet consultancy Dunkirk Systems. As much as I tried to keep The Hot Iron personal, being an entrepreneur makes that nearly impossible, and I intertwined experiences and anecdotes from my daily work.

So here I am 237 posts later. Where I have seen many year-end recaps of posts by many bloggers, I chose not to pour through all and rank them. Some posts that stick out include the one on German domain names, as I received comments with insights from German nationals; the post on the Web sites of my current and former Chicago Alderman as I heard from the sitting Alderman himself (yes, I verified the post was from him!) and the one questioning the rebranding of Delta Airlines, which was quoted on an airline industry blog. The lesson I learned is if you write it, it is out there, and you never know who will read it.

However I am more intrigued by the 410 comments I received. Many were by people I knew prior to writing the post, but more and more came from people I did not know at the beginning of 2007, some I have gotten to know outside of the blog and a few I have met in person. Comments mean more to me than my Feedburner subscriptions, especially when you hear from people who have no idea what the little orange icon means and visit the site on a regular basis.

Now onto 2008. Thanks for reading, and here’s to more “hot” two-way communication.

Announcements • (6) Comments • Permalink

Diversions • (4) Comments • Permalink

Whenever something happens to an elected official – usually something bad – reporters often ask them how they feel their reputation will be after whatever happened. And more often than not, the politician will say history will judge them properly on their action. This is the basis behind the book Power Plays by political analyst Dick Morris.

Power Plays takes on several politicians from the last century and a half and categorizes defining moments in their terms, then compares and contrasts their actions to others – some who faced adversity and did well, and those who did not, and in either case why. It does so in a way that is not of a single opinion, quoting many books, authors and people who knew the subjects, which are all compiled in a lengthy format at the back of the book.

A takeaway from the book is that history repeats itself. Where the times or technology may be different, people tend to make the same mistakes of others, even those who held a similar position. Another is a reaffirmation of the popular phrase “keep your friends close and enemies closer” as in politics, and not much differently than in business, you must build bridges and get buy-in from those against you in order to achieve your own personal or group’s goals and tasks.

My biggest takeaway from the book was to simply be honest. This is something I have always strived for, and is usually the toughest thing to do. Whether it is the task at hand or a business situation or something personal impacting your role in business, the honest approach is usually the best path to take, and many times less complicated than a web of lies. And isn’t it more about how we overcome what has happened than what happened itself?

On the note of honesty, the book interestingly concludes with a comparison to former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s honesty with their respective countrymen about the realities of World War II in comparison to how former President Lyndon Baines Johnson handled communication during the Vietnam War. In his introduction to this section, he makes somewhat of a prediction about the war on terror in Afghanistan – the book was written in 2002 – and states that current President George Bush should follow the FDR/Churchill path of communication rather than the Johnson path in whatever happens in our fighting in the Middle East. It is interesting to read this part in 2007, and I will leave any political opinion to you when you read the book.

Power Plays is an enjoyable text on leadership and history and I highly recommend it. I was pleased I liked the book in the end. I bought the book at a reading Morris did shortly after it came out, along with another book he wrote, Vote.com, which I thought was horrible. Morris is listed as being “behind” the site along with his wife, and the book simply lacked any real substance in my opinion. Maybe that’s why Power Plays sat on my bookshelf for a long time? It was, however, worth the wait.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Book Take-Aways • (0) Comments • Permalink