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Five Sure-Fire Ideas to Help Good Employees Become Great

Five Sure-Fire Ideas to Help Good Employees Become Great It can help a CEO understand how to predict growth challenges. The level of complexity increases due to just one factor – the addition of people. As you add people to your company, you move into different stages of growth. Understanding those challenges helps a CEO…

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How Megabus changed a business model

How Megabus changed a business model What would you do if your business was in decline? What if your predicament was made worst because your entire industry was losing ground? Here’s the story of what one company did. They changed their business model. Their example may hold lessons for you in how to think about…

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How to use job benchmarking to reduce hiring mistakes

How to use job benchmarking to reduce hiring mistakes There are lots of people looking for work and yet a startling lack of the candidates you need. To carry the aquatic metaphor a step too far, I offer the line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Water, water every where…

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Five Ways to Improve Employee Engagement

Five Ways to Improve Employee Engagement Here are the employee engagement facts: Having committed and engaged people is a hallmark of top performing companies. Gallup has measured employee engagement for 30 years surveying over 17 million people. They consistently find that on average only 33% of employees are engaged, while about half (49%) are not…

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Change your habits, change your company

Change your habits, change your company How did one CEO increase his company’s market capitalization by $27 billion? He changed its habits. And when he arrived in late ’87, Alcoa was a company that needed changing. During his tenure, Paul O’Neill increased Alcoa’s net income by five times. According to O’Neill, “I knew I had…

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Make sure roles are crystal clear to grow your company

Make sure roles are crystal clear to grow your company One of the top challenges found in entrepreneurial companies is a confusion over roles and responsibilities.  The most recent high-profile example of this dysfunction’s effect is at Research in Motion, Ltd., (RIM) makers of the Blackberry smart phone.RIM has been led by Co-CEO’s Mike Lazaridis…

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Improve your business startup odds

Improve your business startup odds Did you know that odds are better that a Nik Wallenda can walk over Niagara Falls on a cable than the chances of a business start-up lasting five years?  Past experience at least suggests that would be the line in Vegas. On June 15th, Wallenda became the first man to…

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Maximizing Your Return on Luck: The Key Strategic Insight

Maximizing Your Return on Luck: The Key Strategic Insight By Verne Harnish and Tom Krekel   Hunkering down in year-end strategic planning sessions, you and your team are probably thinking hard about what’s next for the economy and how that will affect your business. Slow down. You should really be laser focused on maximizing what Jim…

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Executing Strategic Plans: 5 Guiding Principles

Executing Strategic Plans: 5 Guiding Principles The Dallas Business Journal had a story about FITCO, a twelve year-old company. In the August 2013 article, CEO Jason Kos said his goal is to take his $20 million company to $100 million in the next six years. What’s his game plan? “We want to make sure people…

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To get better employee accountability: Do ask, don’t tell

To get better employee accountability: Do ask, don’t tell The challenges and pitfalls to fully executing business plans are well known and commonly experienced by managers. Most CEO’s will admit they’re much better at the planning process than with what happens after the off-site. If a key to executing well is a staff that’s engaged,…

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New thinking on employee performance management

New thinking on employee performance management This week The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on yet another large company making changes in how they review and manage their people.  According to the newspaper’s August 22nd article, Kimberly-Clark is getting away from “backward-looking, once-a-year reviews framed largely as a compliance requirement – a paper trail for…

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Faulty SWOTS – A powerful exercise needs rigor

Faulty SWOTS – A powerful exercise needs rigor The SWOT built on sand. Accepting faulty SWOT assumptions The SWOT exercise is a staple of strategic planning sessions. The acronym stands for Strengths, Weaknesses (which are internal to the company) and Opportunities, Threats (or things external to the company or about its industry or competitive landscape).…

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Traps to avoid boring huddles

Traps to avoid boring huddles When huddles don’t seem productive One of the time-saving communication enhancing habits we promote is the daily huddle. It’s the regularly scheduled eight to twelve-minute stand-up meeting. Huddles take advantage of three tools a leader has in getting better performance from a team: Peer pressureCollective intelligenceClear communication When Verne Harnish…

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Using active customer reconnaissance to reduce risk

Using active customer reconnaissance to reduce risk Not seeing and hearing from customers, directly and frequently In the early stages or when there are fewer than twelve employees or so, it is easy to know what customers are feeling. Leaders are still doing. They are still selling, servicing and probably collecting.  Feed-back is a natural…

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Missing trends can blind-side you

Missing trends can blind-side you In the practice of helping companies with strategic thinking and execution planning we regularly set time aside to look at trends. For example, a residential carpet cleaning client saw that the trend toward hardwood floors in homes and workplaces, and was prepared for the impact on its business. Or take…

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Full Sail Strategies - Beware of stretch goals backfiring

Beware of stretch goals backfiring

Beware of stretch goals backfiring Wells Fargo & Co. fired four senior executives this week – part of the continuing fall-out from their sales-practices scandal (see The Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2017). The WSJ article describes “lofty goals that led some staff to engage in improper behavior.” But wait. Aren’t lofty, bold, stretch goals…

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