I can’t remember if it was Al Gore, Mark Cuban, or Leonardo Da Vinci that “invented” the 80/20 rule. Either way, it is one of the more universally applicable concepts to roll out of a R&D department in years. It even applies to our leisure time pursuit. At least eighty per cent of the visual […]
How much would you pay for an idea that made a dramatic improvement in the appearance of your layout? Five dollars? Twenty? Forty? The latter number, forty, corresponds to the ballpark subscription cost of a hobby magazine. I hear it all the time, “I stopped subscribing to magazine X” because: it wasn’t inspirational, it didn’t […]
Decades ago I had a sales trainer that happened to be a former WWII battleship gunner. He was emphatic in consistently making his point that we should practice our sales technique BEFORE we were in front of a customer. He made the point at every session and then immediately drew the analogy to his days in […]
Which DCC system is best? What is the best aisle width? What era should I model? What radius should I make my curves? Ultimately questions such as these end being no more than minutiae, generally irrelevant. There are two primary reasons we engage in model railroading. First is the satisfaction of assembly and as […]
Advancement in our hobby is driven by leadership. In our case it seems to run in twenty year waves. Somebody comes along, moves the needle, and we ride it for several decades. As things begin to peter out, a new visionary comes along and the cycle repeats. In the late 1970’s the triumvirate of […]