In Praise of More Meetings

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 […]

Do You Work for a Good Boss or a Bad One?

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 […]

Bad Leadership and the Baboon in the Corner Office

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 […]

Business Priorities: Do Less, Not More

“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 […]

6 Business Growth Tips from Richard Branson

I recently read an Entrepreneur Magazine’s online article written for small business owners by entrepreneur extraordinaire Richard Branson. Sometimes business advice is so plentiful it’s hard to know what to focus on for business growth. I like having a few key tips to narrow the path a bit, don’t you? With guidelines such as these, […]

CEO Mistakes: What Big Corporations Can Teach Us About Communications

The business press loves to attack big corporations and point out CEO mistakes which cause earnings to slip. I’m cautious about negative hype because journalists know bad news sells better than good news. Yet it’s crucial to pay attention to the CEO mistakes journalists love to point out. When Microsoft, Google, and other huge corporations […]

Business Blind Spots and How to Avoid Them

We see what we expect to see. It’s a well-documented psychological phenomenon. We have virtual blind spots that are created by our brains when something appears that is not expected. As business leaders, we become so passionately entrenched in our strategic vision that we can fail to see evolving trends. James Kerr writes about Business […]

Lessons in Leadership from Sally Ride

What lessons in leadership are left to us by Sally Ride, the first female American astronaut to be launched into space? She died July 23, 2012 at 61 of pancreatic cancer. She was president and CEO of Sally Ride Science, a company she co-founded in 2001 to improve science education for kids, which she called […]

Strategic Story: Off-centered Stuff for Off-centered People

In reflecting about our Dogfish Head Brewery tour, I was impressed with everything about the company, down to the creative use of fonts on the utility cupboards. To me, it embodies the essence of small business strategy, marketing, branding, and customer experiences. They live their strategic story. It’s not just the beer they produce. It’s […]

Dogfish Head Brewery: What Happens When You Hire the Right People

About a week or two before our annual trip to the Delaware seashore, my husband starts getting excited. It’s not just the promise of sand, sun, and the boardwalks. You see, he’s a huge beer aficionado with his particular favorite being Dogfish Head Brewery. Dogfish Head Brewery is based in Milton, DE with a great brewpub very […]