You’re leading an important business meeting. Two people in the back row whisper in each other’s ear throughout the entire meeting. You’re convinced they’re talking about you. Are they? You need an important piece of information to finish a report that’s due by the end of the business day. You’ve sent multiple emails to a […]
Read MoreHow Nice Customers Ruin Business and One Insanely Simple Question to Prevent It
It’s an amazing statistic from a customer satisfaction study conducted by The Strategic Planning Institute. The average business never hears from 96% of its unhappy customers. In other words, only 4% of the time people will tell you when something’s gone wrong with your product or service. Everyone else will be nice. And that’s a […]
Read MoreAll Tasks Are NOT Created Equal
I love how technology handles tasks. Instead of writing and re-writing the same thing over and over again on pieces of paper, technology allows me to create a task once, assign it to a specific day, make it repeat as often as necessary, and have it roll over to the next day if I don’t […]
Read MoreWhy I Hate the Words “Buy-In”
A consulting project I worked on a few years back involved assembling a sales team from the ground up for a start-up technology firm. We hired two national sales reps and turned one existing employee into a sales rep as well. Before one of our weekly meetings, the guys were discussing a document the CEO […]
Read MoreTwo Digital Distractions That Will Destroy Your Days
Today’s scarcest resource, in spite of the recent recession, is not money. Neither, in spite of our busy schedules, is it time. Today’s scarcest resource is attention. We are assaulted from every direction with endless email, texts, RSS feeds, Twitter updates, blog posts, news alerts, podcasts. The list goes on and on. Our days are […]
Read MoreWhat Kind of Authority Do You Have as a Leader?
There are two kinds of authority leaders possess: positional authority and relational authority. Positional authority is the authority that comes from title, rank, and status. It’s the authority you get from the hierarchy of an organization. Relational authority is different. It’s the authority that comes from the trust and respect of others. It cannot be […]
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