Artists will do anything to ensure that their work arrives in front of you exactly as they sent it. This is a problem in an age of Apple, Windows, Linux, and 473 incompatible mobile phones. This is compounded when we don’t use the same software on our myriad platforms. There is almost no common format. … Read more

Life is a chemical reaction. Every one of the 100 trillion cells in your body experiences about 6 billion chemical transactions every second. I bet you never knew how busy you really are! The human body is an astoundingly complex system. We would like to think that we know a lot about it. And certainly, … Read more

Wow. Last week I opened a can of worms. And then I bit off more than I could chew. And then lost the entire contents of my tummy when Junior brought home a bug that let us both hurl yellow effluvium from both sides, in an unusual display of family unity. As a result I … Read more

Lets talk about money this week. I don’t know about you, but after fifty years of trying to get to grips with the subject I find myself sadly lacking. Here’s the thing. In 1992 I was forced to revise all the stuff I had learned about money in business, and since then have been teaching … Read more

A few folk have seen fit to complain about my writing these past few weeks. They say I no longer say good things. I only focus on the bad, it seems. It appears that my raising the spectre of failure is a bad thing. I am buying into all the tabloid hype about our economy, … Read more

There is a tiny loophole in all short term insurance contracts. In normal times it is not worth worrying about. In times like these it is crucial. Let me explain. Assume that your home costs R1-million to rebuild. When you bought it three years ago it cost R500,000. Your insurer will increase the cover on … Read more

A while back I wrote about the fog index – a simple way of seeing how easy your writing is to read. Great concept. The problem is that nobody uses it! Just because we have e-mail, and word processors, and possibly a thesaurus, we each assume that we are a William Shakespeare in the making. … Read more

The most common form of small business borrowing is via overdrafts. We almost all have one, or had one. Nobody points out the risks when we sign on the dotted line, so I am going to do that now. The main risks are: Your overdraft is repayable on demand, at the whim of your bank … Read more

Some time this year your bank manager is going to call you, possibly unexpectedly. Will you be ready? Fifteen years ago I sat on the floor in my lounge in Somerset West. There were no chairs. The local sheriff had just taken all the furniture in a vain effort to satisfy the huge judgments that … Read more

As you get older your eyesight falters. There are a few reasons why this is important. The most crucial is that you don’t often wear your spectacles while showering. This means that when you reach across for the Dove shampoo in the pink plastic bottle it’s very easy to confuse it with the Dove conditioner … Read more