A few years back I visited Best Buy headquarters to interview their CEO and his top lieutenants.

The story you are about to hear is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent …

Starting around the day after Halloween and lasting until after the Rose Bowl, you can hear the seemingly endless droning of holiday music. The performers range from The Ray Conniff Singers to 50 Cent, all sharing their seasonal sentiments on radio stations, retail store PA systems, and of course, elevators.

It doesn’t matter whether we are talking about the big-box store in your market area or regional powerhouse right down the street from you.  If you want to survive and thrive in today’s marketplace, you need to truly understand your competition. You need to know what they do well, as well as what they don’t. 

You’ve finished counting the dough you made over Black Friday weekend and have torn off the next-to-last page of the Classic Cars or Cute Kittens calendar hanging in your office.

Most people think of a brand as a two-dimensional logo, which is made up of a font, color palette, and sometimes a graphic.

You can tell the end of the year is near by the leftover Halloween lollipops and the Christmas music playing in the Bed Bath & Beyond My Budget.

It’s a simple question when you get right down to it.

There’s been an awful lot of talk in the news and social media lately about pay rates.

Five simple words and perhaps the shortest headline I’ve written for YSN. But it is so profoundly important that I’m going to ask again… Would you buy from you? 

When asked what made him such a great hitter, Baseball Hall of Famer Wee Willie Keeler was quoted as saying that he kept his eye on the ball and “Hit ‘em where they ain’t.”

Every organization needs some set of service guidelines to operate cohesively. These rules are normally set by the organizer or owner, based on their own belief systems.

In their second round of retail debates, YSN pundits Gordon Hecht and Rich Lindblom lock horns over the age-old compensation question of commissioned sales vs. hourly pay or salaries.

Remember your first date? Whether it was with someone you knew or arranged blindly, the feeling was the same — a combination of nervousness and excitement that resulted in anxiety.

I happened to be checking out a BrandSource dealer friend of mine’s website recently and I noticed something that caught my eye … though just barely.

It’s not just our industry, it’s a nationwide problem affecting every business sector.

The Batman has gone through several transformations, from comic books to the 1940s movie serials to the Dark Night of this century.

Earlier this week I shared a column espousing the amazing power of positivity.  But there is an even more powerful force out there, and that is negativity. 

Earlier this year I shared some thoughts about staying positive in these unprecedented times, but I’ve been preaching about the power of positive thinking long before that. I have always believed that your attitude has a lot to do with your success in life, or lack thereof. 

Facebook blew it off the map. You probably have a Blackberry sitting in a drawer next to a jar of pennies, and a box of video cassettes you can’t bear to toss out.