Are You the Bottleneck?
Reading Time: < 1 minutePeter Drucker once remarked that, when it came to a company’s overall performance, the “bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle.” Does that describe your impact on your company? In the long run, companies won’t be better than their leadership and that means continual learning. This article from Entrepreneur magazine
Getting Better at Getting Better – a/k/a Continuous Improvement
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe ever increasing degree of competition in the world means that, learning and development can never end. A recent article looks at how the meaning of high performance in the worlds of sports, the arts and finally business , and what it now takes to achieve it, has changed over the years. The
Speaking of Leadership® – If It Works at Google, Is It Right for Others?
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe management practices of successful companies are often touted as ground breaking. Some like Zappos claim to have abandoned traditional management structures altogether in favor of “holacracy”. Yahoo at one time allowed large numbers of employees to work from home (although the latest CEO Marissa Mayer quickly put an end
Speaking of Leadership® – Keeping Your Business Models Relevant
Reading Time: < 1 minuteTechnology and demand for content are disrupting the entertainment business and making life tougher for other content creators and the middlemen. Maybe you can learn how to change your own business model before time and circumstance make if a matter of life and death by absorbing the lessons of those who
Giving Feedback – Are you a Leader?
Reading Time: < 1 minute “It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend of his faults. If you are angry with a man, or hate him, it is not hard to go to him and stab him with words; but so to love a man that you cannot bear to
If You Can’t Wait for Karma, Try This
Reading Time: < 1 minuteMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella garnered some unwelcome publicity this week when he suggested that women in tech should be patient and wait for “karma” to bring their salaries in line with those of their male counterparts. Social media quickly excoriated Nadella for his remarks and he has spent the past few days
May the Strategic Forces (all five of them) Be With You
Reading Time: < 1 minuteMany companies are getting ready for their annual planning retreats and wondering how to create a winning strategy. If one person can be associated with the development of strategy as a discipline in the past thirty years it’s Michael Porter whose book “Competitive Strategy” is the final word on understanding
Another Lost Art: Political Leadership
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe price we pay for technology is that certain art forms go by the wayside. Email and telephones virtually wiped out letter writing; keyboards made the cursive writing most of us learned a thing of the past. Former assistant director of the CIA looks at another lost art: political leadership. In a
Four Reasons Your Strategic Plan Will Fail
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe’re almost to the last quarter of the year and many organizations will begin their annual strategic planning ritual. Before you launch whatever strategy planning process you use, check out this short article in Forbes that offers some cautionary tales about the things that usually take the planning process off the
“What I Really Learned from Running 20 Companies”
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe problem with taking advice from successful people is that their experience, like everyone’s, is a sample size of one. You can’t always be sure if a particular executive was smart or lucky based on just one company, or one career. This is why James Altucher who has run 20 companies and writes