Our previous post talked about Continuous Improvement, but it’s an important topic that deserves to be thoroughly explored, so please consider this a continuation of the discussion we began with our last post. No matter how good we are, we can always be better. No matter how proficient we are, we can always be more
“Change is good; you go first.”
Jim Hemerling is an author and a senior partner/managing director at the famed Boston Consulting Group. One of his particular areas of expertise is change management, so he must be a very busy guy these days because there’s a lot of change to manage. Change is coming at us rapidly, and it’s accelerating. He recently
“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”
The Loyola Ramblers were the “Cinderella” team of this year’s NCAA basketball tournament. True, they didn’t win the championship, but for a team that many thought couldn’t win their Missouri Valley Conference, making it all the way to the Final Four was an incredible feat. On the surface, it may seem that there aren’t any
“The majority of meetings should be discussions that lead to decisions.”
“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.” ~ Thomas Sowell “Has anyone ever said, ‘I wish I could go to more meetings today?’” ~ Matt Mullenweg “Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.” ~ John Kenneth Galbraith I was going to say that meetings get a bad rap,
“The nicest thing about not planning is that failure always comes as a complete surprise and is not preceded by a period of worry and desperation.”
About this time every year . . . somewhere around the beginning of the 4th quarter . . . is a good time to begin planning for next year. Unfortunately, planning is not an activity that most small businesses engage in . . . at least, not in any meaningful way. The owner may have
Be the gatekeeper of your company’s culture.
During the Great Recession, hiring was not much of a problem because most companies weren’t doing any of it. Some imposed a hiring freeze, others laid people off. Now we have the opposite problem: companies want to hire but can’t find the people they want. Best-selling business author Jim Collins uses the analogy of a
Inc. magazine’s 5000 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. (revisited)
Every year, in its September issue, Inc. magazine publishes its “Inc. 5000” annual ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in America. Two years ago, when the Inc. 5000 list for 2015 came out, we extracted some of the highlights in an attempt to learn what characteristics all these entrepreneurs have in common that make them
“The best ideas for improving a job come from those who do it every day.”
A lot has been written lately about “employee engagement” . . . some of it right here. The Gallup organization, which has studied it for many years, says employee engagement can be measured by the strength of the emotional connection an employee feels toward his or her company. If the employee sings the company song,
“You cannot expect to perform at a high level unless people are personally engaged.”
Doug Conant is the former CEO of Campbell’s Soup Company. When he assumed that position in 2001, he says the environment at Campbell’s was “toxic.” One third of his 20,000 employees were looking for jobs elsewhere. He and his team attacked the problem with a strategy of “employee engagement.” As a result, he was able
Are you a bad boss? (Part 2)
My previous posting asked, “Are you a bad boss?” I then offered a number of bad boss behaviors (poor emotional control, indecisiveness, micromanaging, etc.) for your consideration. Well, I apparently missed a few. I have gotten some notes (from people, I assume, who are bad bosses themselves, who are recovering bad bosses, or who at
