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, […]

Social Marketing Is Not Enough: Turn Leads into Profits

Are you turning leads into profits for your business? For all the buzz about online marketing, social media, building relationships with prospects, you know what you really want is business. Online marketing firms tell you to publish quality content on a blog, update Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn, and make it easy for visitors to find […]

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 […]

CEOs of Mid-sized Companies Slow to Use Social Media

I ran across this interesting survey of CEOs of mid-sized companies and how they’re using social media. I’ll share it with you here because no matter what sized company you’re in, social media will become even more important in the coming decade for marketing, customer relationships and product innovations. (Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net) New Survey of CEOs […]

Marketing Is Dead: Long Live Peer Marketing

If traditional marketing (ads, PR, branding, big corporate announcements) is dying as some proclaim, what’s next? Surely social media isn’t the only solution, or is it? Social media marketing still represents a small percentage of marketing efforts. Not only are the results mixed, but no one can decide on how to measure it. And yet […]

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 […]