Business Goals
Effective Efficiency
We all want to be effective, and we all want to be efficient. Too often, these two qualities do not play well together. To be more efficient, businesses cut resources and steps. Then, struggling to achieve results (i.e. seeing their effectiveness decrease), they throw money or time at the quickest fix available. It is the…
Read MoreWhy Ask Why – A Story
Making the right decision is never easy. One of the things that makes it difficult is that we so often are fixing the wrong problem. Once a business problem becomes obvious to us, it has been through various stages of development. If we try to solve only the problem that we see, we risk solving…
Read MoreSuccess Is Not Final
Starting at a young age, we are led to believe that life is fairly linear. You go to school, then you specialize your field of study, then you start working, then you get promoted, then you retire and start playing bridge. At some point, we start to suspect this is not entirely true… The way…
Read MoreThe Four Stages of Business Growth
Each business will determine its own priorities, ingredients, and exact steps as it develops and grows. But within those variations, there remain four essential stages that a business leader must recognize and manage. Much like in Italian cooking. There are many ways to make a tomato sauce, but you will have to use certain base…
Read MoreDecisions, Decisions, Decisions
“Decision Making”, “Problem Solving”, “Innovation” … We all hear these words in our business every day. But what does it all mean? And how do they fit together? These are all about answering the question: “what should we do next”. And the title to this post is no accident: when it comes to decisions in…
Read MoreDon’t Work More: Do More
Every business runs into this: the need to increase capacity without increasing resources. Eventually, any successful business will get so busy with clients that it will not have enough time or people to accept new projects. What can we do? Simply turning the business away is not an option. We want to be continuously growing,…
Read MoreLearn from Lessons Learned
It is said that the more you learn, the less you know. What is really happening is that the more we learn, the more we realize we have to learn. Which is why every major project, initiative, client, and more deserves to end with a “Lessons Learned” review. What Lessons Learned are not A list…
Read MoreMake Change Easy
I was once talking to a friend who worked in a major investment bank and I mentioned that I had just had a lunch meeting with their Head of Change Management. She thought for a second, and then shook her head and said “we don’t have that position”. (To this day I don’t know why…
Read MoreWhat Delegation Is
It’s time to delegate work. Accept that not everything in your business can be run, managed, and executed by a single person. Whether you hire employees, outsource everything to agencies, or do a bit of both: delegation is a requirement. But wait: delegation is not about creating a list of tasks and handing that list…
Read MoreThe Best Way To Buy Software
Is to do it last. This post remains relevant to my usual themes, if the subject is more tactical than usual. We all need software tools to run our business, and our choices here can impact business in a good or bad way. The latter happens when the software choice is made first, and business…
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