Enjoy being corrected: it means you learned something

Last week’s conversation with Mark Galvin on his How’s my ePresence podcast covered many different subjects, once of which was conflicting opinions in the workplace. It is not the first time that I have warned against the dark side of “hiring for culture“. When hiring, you want to make sure you are allowing for, and…

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What to do when people are bad at their job

The first thing is to tell them.  People miss this one simple step more often than you would imagine.  The test Most managers believe that they are telling their employees what the problems are.  The test happens when you fire that employee: if the employee is surprised the problem was the manager, not the employee. …

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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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How Rocky Balboa Handles A Crisis

In the first four Rocky movies, he fights three different opponents. While, admittedly, the narrative arcs of the movies follow similar lines, the training plans differ significantly from one movie to the next.  In each film, he has different strengths and weaknesses. Most notably, a hit to the eye damages his peripheral vision for the…

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2 Key Lessons From A Global Crisis

“Will our current self-isolation change business forever?” The question everybody is asking. People want to know if things will ever “get back to normal” and what life will look like when it does. Will it be a new normal? In two particular ways, we can hope that it will. One: Risk is real  The next…

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From Risk to Opportunity

Risk and opportunity must coexist in business every day. Focus only on risk, and your business will become stagnant. Ignore the risk for opportunity alone, and you will outpace your resources. Somewhere in between Kodak and Pets.com lies the successful business. Right now, COVID19 is doing its part to highlight the risks. Let’s also address…

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The Balance Of Work/Life Balance

When I say “work-life balance”, what do you think?  Employees: “boundaries from work and control over my time.” Employers: “my employees asking for more time off.” Who is right? They both are. And the conflict deepens when the business owner confronts her own work-life balance: “How can I justify the time off to read a…

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Strategy – (Not) Using A Template

R G Brizi Business Consulting

The most challenging part of planning in business is reviewing our own assumptions.  We take a lot for granted about our business and we struggle to examine our situations in detail or see them from new points of view.  This is human.  What is a business leader to do? Templates to the rescue: something with…

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Why 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…

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