As I write this, I am recovering in my hotel room from an early-morning run several times up and down each of the four different staircases in this hotel, in a foreign city (not going to tell you what city, but it's way far away from the US - virtually opposite side of the world). Something I noticed about this modern hotel is that the number of steps between floors varies with each stairwell! While the floors are all level and have no ups or downs in the hallways, the stairwells themselves each have the same number of steps between each of the principal hotel room floors but that number is 21 steps for one of the stairwells, and 22, 23, or 24 steps for the other three (go figure). I don't know the explanation for this, and truth is I'm not even very interested in it, but when you have to run up and down stairwells in a hotel because it's too early for the fitness center to be open, then you have to occupy your mind somehow.

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As organizations set new priorities for 2010, they must understand how continuing market changes will impact future business in order to keep their momentum going. Enterprises must find ways to balance achieving profitability by containing costs in the short term with delivering on customer needs and extracting the greatest value from a customer in the long term. This will help them weather the crisis without destroying their fundamental value, which is the value of their customer base.

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Anyone have any ideas for this newspaper publisher? He runs a state-wide newspaper for a religious denomination, and every two weeks they mail about 16,000 32-page newspapers out to subscribers. Paid advertising makes up about 10% to 15% of these pages. They have a modest e-zine as well, and they have all their news on their Web site, too. Every state has a similar church-denomination newspaper, and he has teamed up with the editors in two other states, with whom he shares news tips and stories. There is no central newspaper organization for the whole country, however. A typical story in his newspaper might be one that covers a controversial resignation or organizational dispute occurring in one of the state or national religious organizations, or maybe a report on missionary work, and so forth. But this newspaper editor's question to me was, what more should he be doing, given the dramatic new technologies available?

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