When a company is in a bad mood, the signs aren’t always overt. People aren’t biting each other’s heads off or glaring sullenly across the conference table. Instead, it feels like everyone is just … coasting. Rather than digging for solutions, they make a cursory effort and then lay the problem at their manager’s feet. They’re not cage-rattlers and idea-sharers; they’re “yes … [More]
The Ultimate Competitive Advantage
People are what sustain — or ruin — your brand. If your people are not excited about the company, indifferent or even alienated from it, your competitive advantage will disappear. When you promote a company of proactive and engaged employees who create a winning culture, sustain it, leverage it, and make it work no matter what comes your way, your business rises above the rest. … [More]
Fairness Is Overrated
During the 20 years Tim Stevens served as executive pastor at Granger Community Church near South Bend, Indiana, the ministry grew from a congregation of 300 to more than 5,000; from a staff of five to more than 130; with a preschool, restaurant, three campuses and more than 1,800 new churches planted in southern India. Stevens, now an executive with the Vanderbloemen Search … [More]
The 5 Choices
The time management experts at FranklinCovey share their five critical techniques for avoiding distractions and paying focused attention to our most important goals and tasks in our daily lives. Every day brings businesspeople a crushing wave of demands — not to mention the high-pressure demands of our jobs — that can be overwhelming and exhausting. The sheer number of … [More]
Think Agile
Funding falls apart. A similar product is unveiled by a more established company. A key employee jumps ship to work for a competitor. These are the unexpected obstacles that derail even the most promising new ventures. Entrepreneurs determined to keep up with today’s constantly changing business environment need to stay nimble enough to shift their strategies, products and … [More]
Critical Knowledge Transfer
When highly skilled subject matter experts, engineers and managers leave their organizations, they take with them years of hard-earned, experience-based knowledge — much of it undocumented and irreplaceable. Organizations can thereby lose a good part of their competitive advantage. The tsunami of “Boomer” retirements has created the most visible, urgent need to transfer such … [More]
Succession
Tichy draws on decades of hands-on experience working with CEOs and boards to provide a framework for building a smart, effective transition pipeline, whether for a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate, a family business, a small startup or a nonprofit. Through revealing case studies like Hewlett Packard, IBM, Yahoo, P&G, Intel and J.C. Penney, he examines why some companies … [More]
Leading through Inspiration
Inspiration and motivation are two completely different concepts, but a majority of managers still make the mistake of interchanging the two. It’s easy to get lost in the semantics, but the difference can be boiled down to one simple observation: motivation can be manufactured, inspiration needs to be instilled. Money, job security and career advancement are all effective … [More]
Employee Cynicism: The ‘In’ Attitude that Hurts Business
In an age of cynicism and irony, Northwestern Mutual is a throwback to a more innocent time. The company is the antithesis of “cool.” It has the kind of culture in which people embrace plain suits and sincere handshakes, take pride in wearing achievement ribbons, kick off conferences with patriotic music. It’s the very portrait of wholesomeness and earnestness — the Boy Scout … [More]
Millennials & Management
As management ages and prepares to work longer than previous generations and Millennials join companies at steady rate, companies are suffering through tension and dissonance between Millennials and Boomers, and realizing that they can’t just wait for management to age out to fix it. This book addresses a very real concern of large and small businesses nationwide: how to … [More]
End the Performance Review
As a business consultant with organizations, both big and small, I regularly hear a litany of complaints about performance reviews or appraisals than range from “The formality of the appraisal stifles discussion” to “They are too infrequent” to “They are rarely followed up.” Please don’t get me wrong — I am not against performance feedback. In fact, I believe it is one of the … [More]
Navigate ‘Unsolvable’ Problems
Innovation. It’s a buzzword that’s so overused it’s tough to understand what it really means and how to capture its elusive spirit. We know we need more of it as businesses are increasingly challenged to produce an outcome that achieves seemingly irreconcilable goals, but we often receive conflicting advice on how to achieve it. When anyone tackles the topic of innovation, the … [More]
Even in the Matrix, Labor Does Have a Price
Matrix teams — formed by bringing together under a new project leader people who already report to another supervisor — is a common method of staffing projects. This is one alternative to outsourcing a project when a business has no team already available that has the requisite skill set. Matrix teams have their benefits and their challenges. There are pitfalls, however, that … [More]
The Alliance
The employer-employee relationship is broken. The old model of guaranteed long-term employment no longer works in a business environment defined by continuous change, but neither does a system in which every employee acts like a free agent. The solution? Stop thinking of employees as either family or free agents. Think of them instead as allies. Managers want employees to help … [More]
The Blind Spot in Sales Management
It’s a simple fact of business: Without sales, no one else downstream can do their jobs. Because of how vital sales are to a company, CEOs frequently tend to misuse their best people. There are three “sins” that minimize the sales management role, which ultimately holds the company back from achieving its growth. When they misallocate key players, small to medium-sized … [More]
The Secret
In this new edition of their classic business fable, Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller get at the heart of what makes a leader successful. Struggling young executive Debbie Brewster asks her mentor the one question she desperately needs answered: “What is the secret of great leaders?” His reply — “great leaders serve” — flummoxes her, but, over time, her mentor reveals the five … [More]
The Leadership Playbook
There are enormous differences between managing and coaching. Yet many companies and organizations encourage their leaders to coach teams without ever teaching them how and without creating a culture that supports coaching. Nathan Jamail, a leading consultant, professional speaker, and the president of his own group of businesses, trains coaches at several Fortune 500 companies … [More]
Predictive Leadership
Most successful, growth-hungry companies begin to miss their projections or worse, not because demand is low or conditions are difficult, but simply because they don’t know how to predict, nurture or even maintain their own growth and success. Most leaders feel isolated, pressured to build on earlier success and maintain total control — the perfect recipe for the 12 most common … [More]
