The Formula to Balance Your Business

Opportunity & risk.  Gains & losses.  Promotion & Prevention.  These are all ways to describe the balance a business needs to succeed. You can’t avoid risk, and you – hopefully – have plenty of opportunities. Making these two things coexist is important, but one of the hardest things to do.  Business potential Back in 2017,…

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How to plan to be spontaneous

“The last thing I want for my business is a plan or a process. I need my people to be spontaneous and adaptable”.  This is an actual quote from a business owner who is terrified of turning his employees into automatons.  His fear is valid: at what point is too much instruction removing any capability…

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Goals Are Not Smart

Achieving work-life balance means knowing what makes us content, both in work and outside of it. Letting your employees bring their personal goals into the workplace will create a strong working culture, with a happy team.  The secret is having everybody use the same structure for managing their goals, so they can be aligned with…

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What 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…

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Change Something Today

Last January I talked about new year’s habits as an option to new year’s resolutions: New year’s resolutions are list items we can start to forget by about mid-February. New year’s goals are targets we can miss and return to for the first six months of the year. New year’s habits, however, are a structured…

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Decision Making Options – Reader Comment

Last month I shared a Reading Room post about Decision Making; it was a series of links to popular methodologies for making decisions. A reader question requested some more information on these methods in action. Ryan Williams is the president of Websuasion, an app development company, and he asked: Thanks for this breakdown, Rebecca. Our…

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Practice Makes Perfect … Maybe

Roger Federer, the great tennis player, was not always the Roger Federer we know today. In his early competition years he was known to make unforced errors and throw tantrums at his own mistakes. As he tells it, he had a natural affinity for tennis. Many complicated decisions and techniques came easy to him, and…

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Rescue a CEO – Setting Goals

It is a pleasure to be once again quoted in the CEO Nation blog: Rescue a CEO. See the article 20 Entrepreneurs Explain How They Determine and Set Their Goals, and check out response number 16.

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Different is Good – or Italy vs France

Unique Value Proposition

The last month or so of posts all stemmed from considering Italian cooking and its similarities to good management. Italian food is common, popular, and often adapted to new locations and tastes. However, in Italy itself there are about half the number of Michelin-starred restaurants as there are in France. And Italy is ok with…

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How to Build Strong Goals

A couple of weeks ago we discussed managing with the correct balance of direction and freedom, and that to achieve this balance, a business needs a strong value statement and strong goals. If your people know where you are headed, they can use their own strengths and ideas to get you there. Having already shared…

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