As leaders, our job is to breathe life into the vision and fill the words with meaning that stir people in the deepest parts of their souls—the parts that long for significance and transformation. Vision is about stirring and provoking, reminding and imagining. It’s about showing people the wonder of an improved future and infusing them with hope. Vision is about creating a reason to believe again.

A deeper understanding of personal values enables marketers to craft key messages that reflect what customers’ value and position these messages in their advertising, product packaging, Web sites and blogs. This can assist in making the right emotional connections at each ‘moment of truth’ – the key points of interaction with your customers.

What I've come to learn is that growth leaders are distinctive not only in their actions, but also in their attributes. These specific attributes are more like personality traits than true management skills, and they ultimately build trust. As an ancient Eastern adage says, "Three things cannot be hidden forever: the sun, the moon, and the truth."

What is it that holds us back from starting or finishing certain things? What is it that makes us knowingly procrastinate - and then, and here's the worst part, beat ourselves up for doing it? And why is it that so many people seem to share this predicament? The more people I talk to about my growing interest in this topic - the more people say to me: when you find the answer - let me know!

For years I have been searching for great companies. My search was driven by a desire to find companies that have new business models, delivering new products and services to customers and executing in new ways. I have written about my discoveries in OUTSMART!, my latest book. Although I could find no single formula for what creates a good – or great – company, I did find some shared characteristics. 

If you are like many, you may be stuck looking only at possible ways to cut even more costs.  Quite frankly, you need to do better.  Cost management is surely important, but if it is your only option, you are not stepping up to your responsibility as a leader.  While probability analysis falls squarely into the domain of management, it is up to leaders to find ways to increase the number of possibilities that can be put into play.

Employers face major challenges when they consider the increasing difficulty of finding skilled people, a younger workforce with different attitudes about work, and a growing population of older workers heading toward retirement. Businesses can improve their ability to attract, retain and improve productivity by applying the following five-step PRIDE process.

We move through life, we make numerous personal transitions inherently knowing how to successfully move from one life milestone to another without missing a beat …  we listen to our little voice and all is well … right? WRONG, I have recently made another type of transition, a professional transition, which has gone about as shaky as any change has ever gone in my life to date. This is an issue for me because I am a firm believer that we must make changes to be able to grow in our personal or professional lives.

A question that often comes up is how can today’s top employees and leaders increase their performance and effectiveness and at the same time maintain their health and emotional well being?  For today’s busy leaders and ambitious employee’s the answer is simple:  time-effective fitness. Time-effective fitness is the simplest answer that busy executives have to the question of how to achieve their career goals and maintain their health, family and personal well being.

Selling any product or service is based on relationships – the relationship between the customer or client and the supplier or product.  It doesn’t matter if it is a product or service, successful sales are based on trust. It is important to understand how sales relationships are established, developed and maintained.

The President’s Management Agenda is almost an unbelievable success story!  Money has been saved, efficiencies have been achieved, and higher accountabilities demonstrated.  We have been in the midst of this transformation the past seven years with significant and positive changes in government that we taxpayers should applaud.  Since most of these are not public activities, very few people outside the government know about them.

When you notice the Window of Dissatisfaction, you’ve got the beginnings of a competitive edge – an “unfair advantage” that will increase your close ratios, shorten your sales cycles, and increase your average deal size. In short, you will excel at sales when you can identify, focus on, and sell to buyers in the Window of Dissatisfaction  … before your competition.

When I complained about my lack of luck to a friend of mine, she quoted Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States, who said, "I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it." As you seek for greater levels of success in your life, remember these "Luck Rules."

For many companies, who have experienced rapid growth, Human Resources is an after thought. You start out with two employees and before you know it, you've grown to over 25. Life in the office goes from being fairly simple to highly complex. Like it or not, it may very well be time to formalize HR processes and procedures in your organization. No need to panic. You can easily accomplish this by hiring an HR Expert.

Companies need to toss out everything they think about customer surveys and do a reality check of what they’ve actually done with the years of data they’ve compiled. They need to compare their effort spent capitulating and hand-waving about how bad the scores are with how much of an effort they’ve made actually doing something about what they heard from customers. And they need to get real…and evaluate if any substantive change has actually taken place as a result. Then they need to STOP and DO something different.

While talking with Steven Pressfield about Killing Rommel, we wandered off the beaten path a bit to discuss the power of story - in business and life - to move people to higher grounds. The kind of power that can inspire people to perform great feats of selflessness and humanity. But, we didn’t stop there - we derailed onto troublesome questions of morality, character and ethics.

Most directors know senior leadership performance matters, but how many know how their own executive team measures up? Recent studies confirm that the leadership behavior of an organization’s executives has a profound
impact on employee engagement, productivity, and retention—factors known to affect overall organizational performance.

Failure often results from following the line of least persistence. Despite the book titles, magazine articles, and guru claims, there are no quick and easy ways to health, happiness, wealth, teamwork, or success. Most "overnight successes" take years to achieve. Most "natural talent" is created through thousands of hours of disciplined training and practice (that's the final level of mastery -- making it look natural).