When Spending Should Get You Fired

If you are a company that uses third party software for functionality, please, do not ever hire an outside “training” firm to come in and teach people who have no obvious use for the third party tool, especially if the price tag is $2,000 per person. This is even more true if you are a software company that employs people who know the third party tool and are willing to teach it to the other employees.

When the time comes for the training to take place, do not schedule meetings that will interrupt the training and to do one better than that, do not hold the training in the same building as the regular office. All that happens with these two things above are people get distracted and the trainer gets frustrated. It causes a waste of time and money.

Running a successful firm requires that management understand managing, not just moving lips and expecting things to happen.

More Airline Industry Consolidation News

In a twist of events, Continental Airlines has chosen not to merge. According to their press release they feel that they are better off as their own entity, though they want to forge ahead with making partners.

This is a blow to the head of United Airlines, which is struggling to drag itself out of the muck that is the current airline industry bankruptcy festival. Without Continental Airlines around to help United in its struggle, United faces a possible merger with US Airways or declaring bankruptcy. My guess would be that they will do whatever possible not to file for Chapter 11 even though a merger with US Airways would mean even worse service than they already provide.

Is the loss of a merger for Continental passengers a bad thing? No, for a few reasons, the biggest of which is that Continental can create stronger ties to different airlines to help offset some of the costs of fuel rather than merging and trying to get the different airline fleets to be consistent.

For passengers it means that there will still be a competitor out there helping to reduce costs and that competitor will be working to further reduce travel costs by partnering with different airlines around the globe.

Great move Continental!