February 14 – Contractors working on construction sites and suppliers of materials to such sites routinely serve what is known as a 20-day preliminary notice on the projects’ owners and construction lenders. One purpose of the notice is to alert all who receive it to the fact that the contractor or supplier is working on the project. Generally, the notice is also a condition precedent to the contractor or supplier making a claim to stop the construction lender from paying others out of the construction loan until sufficient funds are set aside to meet the contractor or supplier’s claim for its work or materials.

What happens if the wrong lender receives the 20-day preliminary notice?

February14 – His company had been producing products for more than 30 years, so the CEO could not understand why new offerings took so long to get to market or why special projects/requests took so long to get done. He became frustrated that things were not getting done in a timely fashion and worried there was a flaw of epic proportions in his company’s culture, resulting in lower return on investment and profitability.

Production was on schedule, deliveries were 98 percent on-time, and sales were on target or better, yet the CEO had a gut feeling something was not right – an intuition the company was “stuck.” He sat down with his team and went through all special projects and all new product processes. Three hours later, the problem became obvious: many members of his team did not know how to plan. They blamed the problem on poor “time management.”

February 14 – When the trustees of Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced their decision to suspend allocating contributions to their long-time partner in women’s health, Planned Parenthood, every nonprofit leader in this country was given a front row seat to learn a valuable lesson in leadership.

Citing fiscal stewardship to their contributors as the deciding factor for withholding proceeds from Komen’s world renowned Race for the Cure, the board approved a policy to stop the flow of contributed dollars to organizations under congressional investigation. With a backdrop of fiduciary responsibility and the isolation of a board room, the decision, in the minds of the decision-makers, made sense.

February 14 – In the past several weeks, spurred on by election rhetoric on both sides of the aisle and amped to new levels during the President’s State of the Union Message, the rush to fix the housing crisis in Washington is hitting levels that have not been seen since . . . well, since the last time Americans went to the polls.

With more voices and voter polls showing that the U.S. populace is placing an extremely high value on the importance of housing as an investment as well as a place to live, those already in public office – and those wanting to get there – are advocating a variety of new initiatives to jump start this segment of the economy while still trying to pass the blame for the slump that is now in its fifth year.