If you’ve ever been a management consultant you’ll love Consulting Demons by Lewis Pinault. My first company (Feld Technologies) did a lot of work for and with a major east coast consulting firm between 1988 and 1993 and I got to see the consulting industry from the inside. In addition to writing all of their back office software (stuff like accounting, recruiting, expense management, time tracking) we worked with them on a number of their client projects as their “IT specialists.”

Jason Wood has an interesting post up titled Failure: Can fearing it impede professional greatness? It’s consistent with the title of his blog (The Ponderings of Woodrow) – really good ponderings on failure here.

There was much Guitar Hero playing last night. Those who were there know who they are and should now bow before a real master. 475,402 and a 425 note streak (hang in there until minute 7 if you want to see some amazing stuff.) I bet this dude is really good at Tempest. Of course, I’m not the master – I’m frustratingly stuck on medium and still get excited when I break 50,000. Yeah – I know it’s kind of weird to be watching Youtube videos of people playing Guiter Hero – Alex and Eran are giggling.

I love it when a smart employee of a company calls out stupid / foolish / irrational / annoying behavior of his employers. Don Dodge – a Microsoftie who I like and respect a lot (and who has a super blog) has a great post up titled Microsoft lawyer rips Google on copyrights – Why? I don’t have a lot to add other than “I agree – why?” and “don’t the lawyers have enough work to do dealing with their own issues?”

Thanks Jake for the reminder. 4 8 15 16 23 42 to you.

Every now and then I realize that I had a theme to my weekend reading. This weekend I absorbed three books: Ego Check, Toilets of the World, and The No Assholes Rule. Do you see the theme? Ego Check – written by CU Professor Mathew Hayward – was pretty good although once again a 225 page book could have been edited down to about 75 pages and gotten the same point across. The anecdotes and stories were mostly familiar to me, although Hayward put them together in a cohesive framework that’s useful if you want to study leadership styles and how “executive hubris” can destroy people and companies. Note to anyone writing a business book – think “75 pages.”

Finally. We had an amazingly wonderful normal weekend in Boulder – sunny, 50 degrees, a little snow hanging around, especially in the mountains. Notwithstanding the daylight savings nonsense (which is irrelevant to me since I wake up while it’s still dark outside and I use Vista now), it’s beautiful here once again now that the White Witch of Narnia has apparently been defeated. Of course, Amy just reminded me that March and April typically bring major spring storms. Fortunately I’m on the road most of the next two months. Wait, what am I saying?

Roger Fillion has a great, detailed article in today’s Rocky Mountain News on Todd Vernon’s experience pitching his company – Lijit – at the recent Venture Capital in the Rocky’s conference. If you missed the conference (or the pitch), here’s Todd’s first slide (that Roger builds his article around.) I thought Roger did a super job of getting inside Todd’s brain in this article. I also thought that Todd’s pitch on Lijit was one of the best at the conference. I recognize that I’m biased because (a) I’m a long time friend of Todd’s, (b) I’m an investor in Lijit, and (c) he compares me favorably to Paris Hilton. But – if you are an entrepreneur looking to pitch your new company, this is a great example.

Fred Wilson pointed me (us) to a video from his friend John Mahoney (CTO / co-founder of Instant Information – one of Fred’s portfolio companies) titled Practical RSS. It’s an excellent seven minute overview of what RSS means from a user’s perspective. John did an outstanding job both explaining it and creating a high quality video.