Happy fourth quarter! I once had a manager who would, um, celebrate the start of a business quarter. That was odd to me as it didn’t really have an impact on the work we did. As this was one of the managers I had had over my career who never took me to lunch this behavior didn’t surprise me.

A Grave Laugh – Let’s end the week with a good laugh with this short film from my friend and filmmaker Floyd Webb who is in and worked on its production.

Now For Something Short to Read – I learned my friend Jen has been writing more in the last year or so and has been publishing her short fiction on her blog. On her site she shared a short fiction Web site where all published works are 50 words. This reminded me of the monthly 53-word writing contest I have entered for a while and have yet to win.

Dear Mike Maddaloni, How Was the Movie? – I saw the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen this week. I haven’t seen the musical, and going into the movie theater I had no idea what the story was about. I enjoyed the movie, but it was very dark. It was also another high school movie that was nothing like my own high school experience eons ago. I recommend you see it, and let me know what you think.

Make Bank Web Sites Great Again – Redesigning a Web site is no small task – trust me on this one. However today there’s options for making something more turnkey, yet still effective. This week I learned that digital agency SilverTech launched KuberaDX to offer such a solution for banks and credit unions. I work with SilverTech and they are brilliant, so this offering will surely be in line with their excellence.

It’s the end of Box Tops as we know it... – With all of the back-to-school information flying around, one thing I haven’t heard about from either of my kiddos schools is Box Tops for Education. Typically back to school is when this program for raising money when certain consumer product purchases are made is one of the main announcements. But I am not surprised – over the last few years the program has morphed from where you collect little coupons printed on packages to where you scan your grocery receipt. Over the years the money the schools have collected has plummeted – I saw this in the app I used to have to do the scanning, and I believe this part of where the problem lies. Friends, families and complete strangers would collect the Box Tops, and it was fun to do – heck, a blog post I wrote years ago got me hundreds of Box Tops from complete strangers. This, and major brands like Kimberly-Clark and Ziploc dropping out of the program may have contributed to its decline as well. I’m not sure where the program will end up, but it may be a quiet demise.

Not Knoweth The Source Of Thine Potential Demise – I share this interview of Chris Best, the CEO of email publishing platform Substack by Brian Stelter on CNN not to engage in a debate about platforms blocking content or not, but rather because Stelter seems to be completely unaware of the success of Substack’s business model, where people can subscribe to people’s email messages. Clearly Stelter didn’t work as a paperboy as a child, let alone the fact that subscription models are nothing new to 2021.

There’s a Reason for Everything – If you or someone you know or love had a Web site that was giving a security error this past week, it could have been because of this error with a service that manages SSL certificates for Web sites. It was not because of caching errors, or some other blathering excuse that someone who has no clue what is going on told you. Or told to me for that matter.

Sayonara & Welcome – Smith & Wesson, the 150+ year old gun manufacturer that just happens to be about 7 miles from where I grew up is now moving over 800 miles away. This week they announced it was moving its headquarters from Springfield, Massachusetts – where it has always been located – to Maryville, Tennessee due to a changing “business climate” in the Bay State. Translation – it’s a changing political climate, as tightening of laws on guns in the Commonwealth would prevent them from being made there. Where I don’t own any of their product, when I had to go to the emergency room as a kiddo it was at Wesson Memorial Hospital. Engineering students at my college would get internships there where, among other engineering experience they would gain, they would get to test guns. Where the total potential jobs loss was not clear, it will certainly be a blow to that area.

Coffee & Learning – This week I decided to start my mornings with some short lessons from LinkedIn Learning. Among the topics I consumed along with my morning coffee were on Blockchain and Succeeding in a New Role by Managing Up. In this short course it had several videos from business leaders, and the one that most resonated with me was by Kathryn Minshew as she talked about when and how to work. My takeaways were to find the best time for you to work and put up the barriers necessary to make sure you can work.

Picked But Pretty – The above photo is of part of Hofacker’s Hillside Orchard a local apple picking farm that’s popular this time of year. Or rather a few weeks ago, as when we went this past week all of the apples were picked from the trees open to the public. Fortunately apples from their back orchard were for sale, as well as the zipline being open for the kiddos to enjoy.

Congrats Kim on the new gig, and I can't wait to hear where you land.

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

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