Our former blog and book in progress is now a 162 page eBook available free for our subscribers. 1001 Ways to Wow Your Customers! will take you on an adventure to “get” what’s possible when customer service becomes strategic. We hope you will be inspired to engage your people to create your unique 1001 ways and achieve breakthroughs in performance. >>Read More

For the corporate leadership team, especially the CEO, the rubber hits the road when it comes to achieving performance targets.  This is why performance management is so important to the CEO and leadership team. Without performance management, the organization will not understand how success is measured.  The time is right to apply performance management to marketing.  This article offers insights and suggestions for how the CEO can tune the marketing organization for peak performance. 

Traditionally business leadership has been about individual decisiveness, clarity of vision, clear command of a situation. Collaboration could have been viewed as a weakness, involving too many people and too much time. Today the tables have turned. The collaborative leader has come of age.

As the global market continues to accelerate, so does the need for leaders who have the courage to “do good and do well.” How can you ensure that you do right by the company, employees, and community? It’s not just about what’s easy, politically correct, or comfortable—it is about having the fortitude to make the right decisions despite the obstacles or what the mainstream might want us to do.

Stepping outside one’s comfort zone is a must for adequate business promotion, by investing in such free growing Internet resources as blogs, podcasts, Youtube, Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  And contrary to common beliefs, these applications do not just appeal to the young. In fact, studies show that the fastest growing demographic in these areas are persons aged 25 years or older.

Directors, VPs and managers have much more power than they realize.  They can patiently create a climate of creativity or they can crush it in a series of subtle comments and gestures.  Their actions send powerful signals.  Their responses to suggestions and ideas are deciphered by staff as encouragement or rejection.  If you want to crush creativity in your organization and eliminate all the unnecessary bother of innovation then here are ten steps that are guaranteed to succeed.

If you want to grow your business while simultaneously increasing customer loyalty, the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) might just be the silver bullet you are looking for.  The Chief Customer Officer or similarly titled role assumes executive-level accountability for customer relationships, much like a COO is accountable for operations and the VP of sales for revenue growth.

While Happiness is a choice - a personal choice - it is to a company's advantage to create the kind of working environment and use the kind of leadership practices - that bring out the best in people, help them feel good about work and their contribution to it. Here are seven ways that you can create happier, more engaged employees.

Today, women are in positions of power at small businesses and global corporations.  We maintain political offices of importance and influence the development of our society.  This is evidence that norms are changing, but not fast enough for us all. If you find yourself still under the influence of this misperception, now is the time to take action.

Customers are rarely to blame for long-drawn out delays. Instead, it is salespeople themselves who are the biggest contributors to the delays they find so frustrating.  Paradoxically, it is the eagerness to move the sale along that leads them into the trap of prematurely presenting solutions for problems their customers don’t clearly recognize they have.

Are you a business leader who’s running your own company? And have you planned your exit from your business? Odds are that you haven’t. A BDO/COMPAS poll found that fewer than half of business owners have an exit strategy in place. Yet your company may be your most important asset. And even if you have no intention of exiting for many years, having a strategy can help you determine the appropriate direction for the business.

There are probably very few of us now who have not been affected by rising fuel costs, either at home or in our businesses. When we’re feeling stretched financially, that is the time to revisit our business purpose and our reasons for doing what we do – our offering and contribution to the world. It is a time to “keep the faith”. How do we do that?

For an organization and its individuals to reap the benefits of diversity it must develop a culture that is inclusive at all levels. In a workplace or society that is diverse, we need to be comfortable with differences, and have dialogue rather than decide for other people what they need.

If you want to reach new heights in business and in life, make sure you do whatever it takes to maximize your lift and minimize your drag. Not only will you avoid the missiles, but you’ll hit your target as well!

Giving a “wow” presentation is about so much more than doing your research, analyzing your audience and selecting the cool facts, statistics, examples, and anecdotes that will be most compelling and interesting. In fact, how you SAY all of those things matters just as much, if not more!  The way you use the many aspects of your voice often determines how well you capture and hold the audience’s attention.

Can you tell your story - or the story of your business? Tell it so it moves someone - moves them to action? Tell your story so it treads well-worn neural pathways achingly familiar to the human mind and spirit? Time-tested pathways ... open, and indeed looking for, great stories? Stories populated with saints, sinners, sorry sad sacks, winners - all, at the core - fighting for their space and place in time?

It was a real pleasure to sit down recently with Nikos Mourkogiannis, a world-renowned leadership consultant who knows the power of a bold idea. Published in 2006 (Palgrave MacMillan), his book Purpose continues to resonate with CEOs around the world. Nikos himself is more certain than ever that senior leaders need to be shaken up--and fast.

There are just a handful of functions that determine all corporate performance. If they are improved by 25% the bottom line improves by 40%. The Corporate 360°® is a unique web-based diagnostic instrument that creates an in-depth analysis of the Critical Functions and presents that in terms of a Balance Sheet and an Income Statement. Within hours the information can be in the hands of management. With that, triggering improvement is easy. >>Read More

Hans Rosling: Debunking Third-world Myths
You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world."
A profile of Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The prophet of boom and doom and author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable and Fooled by Randomness.
Trunk Monkey
A truly innovative idea! (Thanks Paul)

Do your employees like change? When I ask this question of participants in my people management workshops, the answer is almost overwhelmingly no. But when I ask part two of the question: do YOU like change - the answer is usually overwhelmingly yes! Isn't that curious? What happens when you become the boss? Do you go through some magic door and change your mindset about change?