Best Practices Archives - Zhivago Partners

The attack of the legacy systems: How to avoid the Southwest Syndrome

For a company that does so many things right—and yes, I am a staunch Southwest Airlines fan, based on personal experience with numerous domestic airlines—they really messed up over the holidays, as we all know by now.

Strength and weakness text on asphalt ground, feet and shoes on

Business Leadership: Are your personal characteristics killing your company?

The truth is, we are all a combination of positive and negative characteristics. No company leader is perfect. Which means that we have to be careful that our negative characteristics aren’t killing our companies without us realizing it.

Business Owners: What 2021 will require of us

If you are a business owner, and especially if you are a small business owner, 2020 was a very challenging year. Even more so if you were in an industry directly affected by the pandemic. There is hope, though.

Man in front of computer with hands over his face

Death by website: 5 website design mistakes to avoid

A good website design will grow your business; a bad website design will kill it. It is definitely possible to create a website and then watch it suck revenue right out of your company. We wouldn’t like that to happen to you.

Iron gates with beautiful scrollwork on the gates

Digital marketing and cybersecurity: A very practical checklist.

Those of us who work in digital marketing deal a lot with confidential information, and we need to do what we can to protect it from the bad guys. But there are other more recent threats that are increasing the importance of cybersecurity. Many recent cybersecurity examples often involve ransomware—where a hacker gets inside of a corporate network and “dwells” there for months, figuring out where the important information resides, and learning how to shut down the company’s network.

Office workers using their mobile devices together

Essential management skills in the Age of Apps

We are living in the Age of Apps. I guess you could call this the App Age, like the Industrial Age and the Agrarian Age that came before. All business is now run on apps (or applications, which is how many people refer to software running on larger-than-mobile systems; I’m going to use “apps” here for all types). We communicate with each other on apps.