Bosses Hierarchy

Let us start counting:

In big businesses, there is regional manager who supervises the country managers in all countries which fall in his region. Country managers guide the branch managers who in turn make sure that sales and service department managers are doing their jobs perfectly. The department managers, of course, need to have supervisors to manage the teams of salespeople who are doing the actual selling.

And I have not yet mentioned the top management, personal assistants and secretaries.

This is how most of the big (or even medium-sized) businesses operate. And these are the businesses who are in real trouble right now.

And they are really addicted to their way of doing business. That is why the top bosses of auto industry in USA flew to Washington in private jets to ask for the money to avoid bankruptcy.

Small businesses don't have these hierarchies. The business owner is the one who builds the products with the help of his small team, sells and provides support and service when needed and takes lunch on the same table with all his employees.

If you have been planning to start your own small business, now is a good time. To cut costs, a lot of people and companies are looking for cheaper products and services which only small businesses can provide.

Lets us get started.

Lateral Thinking

Floating black balls on water surface; a novel idea to stop sunlight reaching towards a huge open water reservoir. Amazing.

Things-to-do with Gmail

Google has added a really nice 'Tasks' feature to gmail which you can use to manage your things-to-do lists right there in your gmail account. It is still an experimental feature so you will need to enable it by going through the Settings--Lab tab.

You can create tasks by entering a single line description or from within an email. It will even link that task to the email using email subject as the text for the task (you can change it though)

If you are still keeping everything in your head, take a break and off-load your thinking to gmail tasks list.