Timothy E. Archer

Recently, in an MBA class I was taking (Human Resources Management), I came across the 6 rules Jack Welch lives by.

For those who have no idea who Jack Welch is, he was Chairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001. He practiced some unique leadership strategies during his tenure at GE, and increased its market capitalization by over $400 billion

I felt that the 6 rules are worth sharing with the the world and am publishing them below through this blog. By the way, I just finished the program and earned my MBA degree! Yay for me!

The six rules are:

1. Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.
2. Be candid with everyone.
3. Don’t manage, lead.
4. Change before you have to.
5. If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.
6. Control your own destiny, or someone else will.

Recently I added a fraud alert to my credit report to see what exactly it does.

I went to http://www.experian.com/fraud and added an Initial Security Alert (90 days) to my credit report. Surprisingly, this was very easy to do, and only took me about 10 minutes. In any case, I got a free peek at who’s been viewing my credit, what accounts I have open, etc. I was able to verify that there are no other accounts in my name (thankfully, there were none), and I even submitted a dispute that a card that I am no longer an authorized purchaser on is still listed in my credit. Within 2 weeks that card was removed from my credit report. It is important to note that you will not be shown your FICO score when submitting a fraud alert. You can pay a small amount to have it displayed though.

After submitting the fraud alert, I also received a confirmation in the mail from Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax that they have put fraud alerts on my file which will last 90 days. It seems Experian notified the other big credit bureaus on my behalf. This was a nice bonus.
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Today I had a slight crisis…I had to reinstall QuickBooks 2006 on a new computer and restore the backup file that QuickBooks creates with the “.qbb” extension.

Everything worked great, and it was literally as simple as popping in the QuickBooks CD, installing the software, launching the program, and then following the steps from the “File->Restore menu”.

However, once I went into the Loan Manager to make a loan payment, I discovered none of the loans that I setup were there. I learned the hard way that the Loan Manager data is not backed up with your QuickBooks backup file. I really did not want to re-key in my loans, figure out what payment number I was on, determine principal and interest components, etc…Needless to say I was a little sad and looked for a way to get my Loan Manager data back.
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