Speaking of Leadership^® Blog

Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe late, great Peter Drucker once remarked that “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”  Great advice….and how do you do go about knowing and understanding the customer? Marketing guru Seth Godin says you start

Reading Time: < 1 minuteIf you don’t have the time or money for that MBA, there are any number of online courses (Coursera) you can take.    Added to these course offerings are a dozen Netflix documentaries about the people that have built organizations and how they created and managed these companies…..and themselves.  Check out

Reading Time: < 1 minuteMichael Milken (of Wall Street Fame) holds the Milken Conference each year featuring dozens of the world’s best known entrepreneurs, scientists, financiers, researchers and other notables in hour long seminars on topics such as financial markets, the economy, medicine, Millennials, health care and much more.  Most of us can not

Reading Time: < 1 minuteIt’s often said that the “road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”  This past week, a young CEO, Dan Price, who founded Gravity Payments, a credit card payments processing firm, cut his pay from $1,000,000 to $70,000 and raised the pay of ALL employees making less than $70,000 to

Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe often think of “disruption” as belonging to the realm of startups or big, but innovative and relatively young companies like Google or Apple.  Is it luck…is it art… or is it science?.   One really old, really large company that makes many products you use every day knows that disruption

Reading Time: < 1 minuteMark Cuban is best known as the founder of Broadcast.Com, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a regular on “Shark Tank.”   What you may not know is that after graduating from college he launched his tech career by becoming…. a bartender.   Check out this summary of the rest of

Reading Time: < 1 minuteSuccessful people usually have a well-defined purpose in life.  That they have one and that it’s well defined is usually quite clear, but how he or she arrived at it often isn’t.    Here’s a compelling graphic that may help you or a young person in your life understand how to

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI continually hear from CEOs that it is hard to find A players – we have lots of B’s and C’s and, unfortunately,  these types will not get us to the next level.  Labor markets get tight is already tight in manufacturing and will get tighter elsewhere as the economy continues

Reading Time: < 1 minuteHere’s a quick summary of  interesting research done on children who were learning to play a musical instrument.  It turns out that practice and talent were not the final determinants of success in music, but something much more basic.   Find out why if you want to learn a new skill

Reading Time: < 1 minuteOne of the great qualities that make us human is the ability to see patterns in a few data points.  The problem is we often convince ourselves that those patterns, especially those that augur good times or bad times, will persist indefinitely.  We can learn a valuable lesson from marketing