Many of us struggle with having a seemingly endless ToDo list. While prioritizing it can sometimes help, often writing the number 48 in front of an activity can just cause more frustration. Years ago I looked for ways to manage my list. I asked peers and mentors how they dealt with the things they had … Continue reading The Eisenhower Matrix
Category: Leadership
Just picked up the new business framework book Scaling Up written by Verne Harnish over at Gazelles. It's a great book! The book breaks the challenges down into four areas. People, strategy, execution, cash. Very straightforward and includes concrete behaviors and practical examples. Verne and the team also give you plenty of room to experiment … Continue reading Scaling Up
As a small business owner or a sales manager for a small business you should be able to answer these questions: How big is our sales pipeline both in terms of opportunities and dollars? Given the size of our pipeline what are the chances we are going to hit our monthly sales target? How long … Continue reading Critical Sales Metrics for Small Business
I was again honored by having Steve Jagler of the Milwaukee Biz Times interview me on my customer philosophy. The idea that: ... the damage to our team and our company is too great to stay in relationships with abusive clients May seem absurd, but after you’ve tried everything you can to make thing … Continue reading Don’t be afraid to fire a customer
Having sat through many organization’s strategic planning session witnessing nearly the same amount of SWOT analyses, I’ve come to the concusion that they rarely create value. It’s not that they NEVER are useful, it’s just that they typically get a team looking inward and backward as opposed to outward and forward. Further, SWOT can be disembodied … Continue reading STP over SWOT
From a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) standpoint my personailty is often described as ENTP or ENTJ. With each letter describing where I stand in the four personality dichotomies, I’m (E)xtraverted, use i(N)tuition to make many decisions, enjoy (T)thinking about problems and am (P)erceptive or (J)udging in many lifestyle choices. The result I get just depends … Continue reading Life as an ENTx Leader
A good discussion by Steven J. Spear on how experimentation is useful when dealing with complex systems like markets and Mustangs. Spear explains how this technique led Toyota to the creation of Lexus.
I just finished reading Deborah Mills-Scofield’s HBR article on bringing back corporate accountability. This is a great article in its own right. It lead me to an article she posted in April of this year on building Communities of Practice by Building Virtues into the Organization’s DNA. Her moonshots to fix problems we see in … Continue reading Revamp an Organizations DNA?
I spend a fair amount of time these days working with senior business leaders on some of the challenges they face. One of the things that both they and I are seeing is the impact of shorter business cycles on planning. While the use of the word “cycle” implies that these changes occur with some … Continue reading Agile and the Boom/Bust Cycle
I talk quite a bit about the concept of intrinsic motivation in my presentations and workshops. Intrinsic motivation describes our satisfaction in doing something simply for the sake of doing it. Think of playing an instrument, solving a puzzle or painting a picture. The activity is a reward in itself. Daniel Pink’s “Drive” is great … Continue reading Intrinsic Motivation – Drive