In a recent edition of the Daily Herald’s Business Ledger, the focus was on family businesses. More specifically, the focus was on succession planning so that the business could remain in the family and continue to benefit family members for many generations. One of the stories discussed Klein Tools, a business that has been in
“Everyone has a number.”
While monthly financial statements are essential to effectively managing your business, they are historical documents. They tell you what’s already happened when it’s too late to do anything about it. So in addition to monthly financial statements, you also need measurements that are predictive in nature to serve as early warning signs that something may
Are you a Visionary or an Integrator?
In his book, “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business,” Gino Wickman envisions an organizational chart with the guy at the top as the “Visionary” and the guy immediately below him as the “Integrator.” In Wickman’s model, the Visionary is the company’s creative sparkplug, the guy who sees opportunities and possibilities and is always pushing
“Accountability breeds response-ability.”
In our last posting, we talked about execution . . . about the need for meticulous planning, thorough and detailed communication of our plans, and after-the-fact review to determine what went right and what didn’t in an effort to continuously improve our execution skills and abilities. We probably should have preceded that discussion with one
It’s all in the execution.
James “Murph” Murphy is a former F-15 fighter pilot who left the Air Force after 12 years to enter the business world. In his book, “Flawless Execution,” he talks about the rigors of being a fighter pilot, about the exhaustive work pilots do as they prepare to fly a “mission,” and about the concentration and
Tear down those information silos!
In a recent Time magazine article entitled “We’ve All Got GM Problems,” columnist Rana Foroohar talks about General Motors’ recall problems. She says the problems came to a head because the people and departments involved “literally weren’t communicating with one another.” She chalks up those problems to “a systemic problem in most big corporations as
Does fear of failure motivate or paralyze you?
There was an interesting article published recently in the Chicago Tribune. In it, a member of Chicago’s iconic business clan, the Pritzkers, talked about failure and the role it has played in shaping his life. While we have discussed failure here in the past, it’s a subject worth revisiting from time to time, if only
“The art of communication is the language of leadership.”
Get your workforce engaged! (104) In this fourth and final installment of our series on developing an “engaged” workforce, we’re going talk about the need for effective communication. We touched on communication in the first installment of this series when we said, “Your values, mission, and vision need to be in writing, and they need
Put the right people on the bus . . .
This is the third installment of a series on developing an “engaged” workforce . . . that is, a workforce that energetically supports your company and its goals. In the first installment, we talked about the importance of clearly communicating the company’s mission, vision, values, and culture. Essentially, those four things (with apologies to business
“Can’t lead from behind.”
Our previous posting was the first installment of this series on building an “engaged” workforce. In that posting, we talked about vision, values, mission, and culture being foundational to a truly engaged workforce. After all, we argued, employees need to know what the organization does, why it does what it does, what outcomes it hopes
