Quoted: How to Make Better Business Decisions

Learn the Lessons

I am delighted to feature once again in the NCR Silver blog, courtesy of a writer Meg Hall. How to Make Better Business Decisions Seeing my online course: Effective Decision Making in Business, Meg and I had an exchange about how business owners and leaders can make their decisions impactful for the long term. Click…

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Jinfo Article – What problem does your information centre solve?

My latest article for Jinfo is now live [Subscription required]. Success in business is always about the value that you bring, whether that value is to your external clients, your internal users, your supervisors and directors, etc. In this article I discuss how Information Departments can define and prove value to their organizations. If you…

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Rescue a CEO – Entrepreneurial Tips

Rescue a CEO is a blog operating under the CEO Blog Nation umbrella, and I am delighted to have been featured as one of their 25 Entrepreneurs Sharing Business Tips. See number 17 on the page.

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How I Work – Decision Making

ManagementstudyGuide.com has a lesson on Decision Making: it is 21 chapters long. Guess who doesn’t have time to read 21 chapters about decision making? Business owners who are making a dozen decisions a day. Formal Problem Solving is a multi-step process that includes interviews, reports, meetings and project management, and it is completely unrealistic in…

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How I Work – Investing in Your Business

A company I was advising had big dreams for research & development. The management board however shared concerns about budget allocations and cannibalizing the well-functioning parts of the business. They didn’t want to risk under-funding their business for the sake of innovation.  A thorough resource audit allowed us to re-assign small profits from various business…

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How I work – Why Plan

To Business Plan or not to Business Plan. The eternal question. Do you spend a few months on analyzing, compiling, writing and presenting, to then place your multi-page document in a bottom drawer, never to be seen again? Or do you move forward in your business ad hoc, taking opportunities as they arise without a…

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How I work – Differentiation

Differentiation in business is what makes one company more attractive than another. The simplest differentiation is price, but it is also the weakest, because nobody wins in a price war. A media company client of mine was losing business to a more established, well known brand. I had the owner do an exercise to describe…

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How I work – Competitive Products

I worked with a software client whose CEO would say “We have no direct competition”. As they prepared to pitch for seed investment, I worried this statement would make them look like amateurs. Applying my belief that an intelligent question is more helpful than an intelligent answer, I used the theory of competition categories, the…

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How I work – Professional Competencies

Professional competencies speak to how technical skills are applied. They will demonstrate an employee’s potential for promotion within the business. Everybody claims to want the same competencies in a candidate, so I examine how these are exhibited in the workplace, against the company’s goals. With this I build a prioritized competency table, like a point…

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