“If you want to know how to write a business proposal, the person to ask is your customer. A business proposal should answer your customer’s questions and persaude them to select you. You should write your business proposal to meet your customer’s expectations. But first you have to know what they are. Some general advice for how to write business proposals are provided below…”

“The Historic Corporate Reports Collection consists of selected original company documents from circa 1820 to the present. Included are annual reports, prospectuses, proxies, registration statements, and miscellaneous items such as brokerage-house reports, charts, and unpublished corporate histories. The collection documents approximately 20,000 companies.”

“Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work: 6 Lessons is an article that I meant to link to ages ago, and is presented here for the sake of completeness. ‘Crunch mode’ — working extra hours each day for extended periods in order to meet a (usually arbitrary and unrealistic) deadline — is a term that’s familiar to programmers, especially any who’ve worked at a small firm or start-up over the past 10 years.”

“Transparency, of course, is a term very much in vogue due in large part to the rise of trends like corporate blogging, which in theory makes organizations more transparent. While the notion of transparency may be suffering from the hype cycle just a bit, I think watching events unfold transparently is beneficial from both the internal and external perspectives. It helps build trust, may assist in the fostering of new relationships, and lessens the ability for others to inject Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) into your project/business/etc…”

“So you‚Äôve never heard of ‘The Long Tail’ theory. Do yourself a favor, take 16 minutes and listen to the author who wrote this seminal piece in a recent Wired magazine edition. ‘The Long Tail is about the economics of abundance–what happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone.’ Chris Anderson is a brainiac with street smarts and a pen. The dude can flat-out write (and talk).”

“A while back commenter ‘Tom’ asked: ‘Why is the Tech industry so quick to fall into the latest buzzword?’, and I promised a post-length answer. Here it is. First, I am going to grant the premise that tech is probably inclined to cling to buzzwords and phrases more than your average industrial sector — though there are others equally or more susceptible [ahem] media and journalism [/ahem]. So why?”

“Badbossology.com features completely free access to over 1200 articles and resources on solving problems with difficult managers.”

“As inspired by Seth’s Blog: Part of the 30?, a modest suggestion of 30 books to get you pointed in the right direction for an MBA in Entrepreneurship (alphabetically by author)…”

“The whys and how-tos of business blogging… Small business resources to help you start, manage and grow your business.”

“Business dictionaries and glossaries indexed by the OneLook search engine that include English…”

“We all have people with whom we have to work to get things done. Our ability to communicate with clients, customers, subordinates, peers, and superiors can enhance our effectiveness or sabotage us. Many times, our verbal skills make the difference. Here are 10 ways to increase your verbal efficacy at work…”

Here’s a fun one: “In a piece for The Rake Magazine, Greg Beato pays homage to Minneapolis’s greatest invention, and celebrates 25 years of Post Its. All this buzz around the blogosphere inspired me to highlight a couple of my favorite instances in which Post-Its had their moment in the limelight.”

“Five years ago this week Britain’s dotcom dream died, killed off by a Swedish poetry critic and a former Vogue model, as fashion ‘e-tailer’ Boo.com became the country’s first high-profile internet collapse.”

“If your motives are purely financial, chances are you will make far more money by starting and growing a single company. Bill Gates and Paul Allen, two of the world’s richest men, made the vast majority of their money from Microsoft. Sam Walton, whose heirs have a net worth that exceeds $100 billion, created that wealth with Wal-Mart. But if you are motivated most by seeing your mental creations come into existence and gain lives of their own, then serial or parallel entrepreneuring may be for you.”

“Its trouble began after an individual posted instructions on a Web site showing how the company’s sleek but seemingly indestructible Kryptonite bicycle lock could be undone with a Bic pen. The story gradually spread over the Internet as bloggers wrote about the fatal flaw and provided links to the Web site. Within five days, the bloggers’ details were picked up by mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times. Ingersoll-Rand could have limited the damage to its brand if it had used a service to track its reputation on the Web, says David Sifry, chief executive officer of Technorati, a blog tracking and search company based in San Francisco.”