Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Communication has been streamlined to short messages. Your management should be too. I’m a big fan of short, concise, summarized communication.

Trimming the fat is great; cutting to the bone will reduce your revenues, your profits, and your survival prospects. We recently heard a CFO bragging about his ability to improve the profitability of companies: “I have worked with three businesses, and in each of them I have managed to increase profits while revenue is falling.” We’ve seen this mindset in a number of incarnations, typically from finance people (it’s tough for us finance guys to admit that) who work for a private equity firm or a portfolio company.

Want to grow your business? Do what men do.

A Procter & Gamble chief defends marketing cutbacks by referring to the less expensive benefits of digital marketing. Um, really

A cognitive psychologist has developed a toolkit to help anyone be more inventive by shedding their preconceived ideas and thinking like a kid. Every entrepreneur is trying to do something new and better. If your business doesn't improve in some way on the other dry cleaner in town or other app in the space, then why bother starting it, right?

When Apple first released its Messages overhaul for the way iPhones handle test messages, and enabled it on iPads too, it was a sign that the company could see ways to innovate the pretty-much stagnant instant messaging market. It also let users of its iCloud service send short messages to each other without necessarily having to pay phone networks for the privilege. Now Apple's said it's expanding Messages to the OS X desktop, and that's big news

These aren't worker bees.

The other day I really wasn’t paying much attention to the AM news station in my car until I heard a commercial for a web-based company imaginatively branded Reputation.com . I got to wondering about this kind of service, and when I typed “reputation management” into a search engine I was taken aback to see more than 10 million results

The recession is ending. Will you be ready?

Billionaire hedge fund manager Philip Falcone's hopes to build a state-of-the-art open wireless broadband network are put on hold because his signal jams GPS devices.

Taking on an investor is a lot like getting married. Here's how to make the courtship a bit easier. Strong marriages often begin with a period of courtship, when two potential partners discover their good and bad habits, become comfortable with each other’s plans for the future, and of course meet the relatives.

These few metrics will give you some added insight into just how much progress your company is making. Entrepreneurs routinely ask me what my one or two go-to financial metrics are, beyond the standard revenue, gross margin, net income and cash ratios.

These days, if you can't lead your company through rapid, continual change, you can't lead. It is easy to change things. It is hard to change people

It's not enough to have just one way of leading: Different circumstances require separate management styles. When it comes to leadership it doesn't matter if you manage a company with 500 employees or one where you are the only employee. Either environment will disprove the myth that leaders should stick to just one leadership style that they have perfected.

When it comes to branding, the larger danger is spending too much, rather than spending too little. It's a myth that having lots of brands and plenty of branding is good for business. After a certain point, both brands and branding cease to be useful–and, in fact, can be positively toxic.