Category: Strategy

Reading Time: < 1 minute If you are at all familiar with the history of business you know Rockefeller’s  Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel, Ford, and JP Morgan’s banking empire changed forever the business landscape and created in large measure the world we know today.  No doubt Amazon will be included in this commercial pantheon when

Reading Time: < 1 minute Every business has a strategy, whether intentionally chosen or not.  If you are not sure what your strategy is, it may help to know what “strategy”  really means. Strategy is a word that many of us use but perhaps without a clear definition of it.   To remedy this, check out a

Reading Time: < 1 minute In the late 1990s’ Internet bubble, many people were seduced into believing that profits didn’t matter, only growth.   Time has a way of making people forget painful lessons as Professor Scott Galloway reminds us this week in his “No Mercy, No Malice” blog. He looks at Uber, WeWorks, Lyft and

Reading Time: < 1 minute “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”  wrote the Russian novelist Tolstoy.   The same seems to be  true for “happy” (successful) businesses.  Regardless of the nature of the product or service offered,  the most successful companies today can be considered “software” companies in that

Reading Time: < 1 minute Nobody would dispute that referrals are a vital aspect of sales success but do you really understand where they come from and how to systematically generate them?  Vistage Chief Research Officer Joe Galvin asked several thousand Vistage members running SMB companies to contribute their best practices in referral generation.   This short article

Reading Time: < 1 minute If you’re looking to start a business, or advising a young entrepreneur to do so, a fundamental choice is what kind of business to start.  A very successful venture capitalist suggests that many people only look at the type of businesses they see succeeding around them, or that they themselves buy

Reading Time: < 1 minute The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr once remarked to a young scientist who had presented a new idea to him that “Your idea is crazy.  The problem is that it’s not crazy enough to work.”  Many new businesses start out with a business model and/or strategies that are dismissed as “to crazy

Reading Time: < 1 minute We are constantly reminded about the importance of a strong company-wide culture.  But there are sub-cultures within the whole.  Take sales, Do you know who owns the sales culture? Is it the CEO, the Sales Manager, the COO?   Collen Stanley, Vistage Speaker and president of Sales Leadership, Inc. knows, and if

Reading Time: < 1 minute The founder of Ikea, Ingvar Kamprad passed away on January 31. His extraordinary success (he was number 10 on the world’s richest persons list) by bringing a new business model to an old category is the stuff of business legends. What was so different about his offering? Vistage’s premier speaker

Reading Time: < 1 minute Few people had more important and momentous careers that President Dwight (Ike) Eisenhower. During World War II he was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe.  He not only led the planning for the invasion of Europe, his remarkable interpersonal skills held together a fragile coalition of US, English,