How can you adjust your blog strategies if your business needs to reach different customer segments? Let’s say you sell accounting software to big businesses, small businesses and freelancers. Clearly, you wouldn’t want to send the same marketing message to all of these groups, as it can be confusing. Sending a mixed message turns off […]
Are you a purposeful leader? If so, you’re in the minority. According to a 10-year research project, only 10% of managers are purposefully engaged, highly focused and energetic. This is according to Heike Bruch’s and Sumantra Ghoshal’s study, published in A Bias for Action, (Harvard Business Press, 2004). “By its very nature, a manager’s job […]
As a business leader, you know what to do, but are you actually doing it? Knowing vs doing becomes a struggle when day-to-day business requires triage – putting off some priorities in favor of others. Only about 10 percent of managers work purposefully to complete important tasks, according to a 10-year study of managerial behavior […]
The first thing I do in any almost any new client engagement is survey their clients and employees. It’s critical to getting the information I need to get the results the client wants. It immediately tells me if the client is living their brand promise, if there are customer service issues that need to be […]
Let me ask you about your business: Do you have an accountability plan that people follow? Does everyone know what their priorities are? Is everyone aligned with their priorities, do they know why they are doing what they do? Why is it that we put so much energy into things that aren’t important, just to […]
If your company is growing, it probably has well-established priorities. The organization that understands and acts upon its top five priorities is one that progresses and grows. As a business leader, how are you growing your company? You need to keep each person working in the company focused. It’s harder to do once a company […]
What’s needed are more meetings. Everyone in any kind of growing company should be in some kind of five to 15-minute focused, purposeful meeting on a regular basis. Yes, I know everyone is busy, and we’ve learned to hate meetings. But not the kind of short and focused meetings I’m talking about. Even if it’s […]
Would you say you work for a good boss, or a bad one?Ask people about their bosses, and you’ll hear about the two types they’ve worked for: the ones they’ve loved and the ones they couldn’t wait to escape. When asked for a list of defining qualities, most people identify the following attributes, according to […]
What can we learn from bad leadership and CEO failures? Most newly appointed leaders start out looking pretty good. Yet behind every failed business is an example of bad leadership. The human animal resembles baboons who live and work in small groups where they seek out an alpha male to provide safety and security. As […]
“Less is more,” the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe liked to say. Can that be true in business? When we focus on fewer business priorities, do we get more of the right stuff done? And does it mean more success, more business growth, not less? I recently read an interesting Harvard Business Review post […]
