To survive this nasty Covid-19 surge facing businesses of all types, leaders must make decisions that hurt but are necessary. Keep the employees for the SBA PPP requirements regarding loan forgiveness, or furlough or let good employees go, so they can file unemployment claims? And what about termination decisions you make affecting just the few […]
Dave Berkus
Could You Be Your Company’s Bottleneck?
So many tasks; so little time As a manager, you have a number of critical tasks that are general to your position as opposed to specific to your industry. These include ensuring the continued health of the organization, setting the moral compass for your stakeholders, providing for succession by training and documenting, leading the effort […]
Remember the FAIRNESS Doctrine to Avoid Lawsuit Threats
Reduce the emotion; reduce the threat of lawsuit. You’ve almost certainly experienced an angry “it’s unfair” outburst from an associate or employee. Usually it’s just after they’ve learned of an action that they took as “unfair,” no matter how rational the explanation by the decision maker. Most emotional responses to decisions in business are generated […]
Cash control during these strange times
These are indeed strange times, especially if you haven’t lived through 2000-2002 and 2007-2008 recessions and difficulty in finding money from banks and investors. The simple economic truth Here is a simple economic truth. Fixed overhead continues to eat into your cash month after month. It doesn’t differentiate facile, efficient businesses from slow, disorganized, quality-challenged […]
Do You Empower Others?
As a leader for your team or business, it is important for you to build consensus in most every major decision. To do that, you must be able to relinquish some degree of power, overriding decisions made by consensus only with some thought and certainly with an explanation to those involved. Never fear empowering others […]
COVID-19 Is a Black Swan Event–Do You Even Know What Questions to Ask?
Great executives and managers seem to intuitively know what they don’t know. But it is not at all uncommon to not even know what questions to ask. Who would have thought about COVID 19 and public’s panic responses? Image credit: Alexas_Fotos / Pixabay One week we all thought we had our responses dedicated to supply […]
CoronaVirus and Small Business: A Discussion About Economics
The CoronaVirus (Covid-19) will potentially cause some real economic disruptions in the US. Specifically, it will have an adverse affect on small and medium-sized businesses. Here are some tips to consider. Advice to managers, entrepreneurs With a multitude of caveats, it might be worthwhile to heed the following advice: Anticipate the worst, prepare for it, […]
Are You a Consensus Leader or Dictator?
It’s a good bet that you’ve been exposed to articles, courses and lectures about various styles of management. You’ve read how each is appropriate for some companies and for some levels of organization and at various times. When should the dictator in you emerge? A consensus-building leader works well in that style until someone yells […]
How to Undermine or Reinforce Your Corporate Culture
Ever had a manager who hung those motivational posters around the office, spoke of “pushing together,” or “you’re empowered to give great service”—and then acted at least once in complete disregard of those statements? You don’t want to be caught even once It takes only one time caught by subordinates to lose the faith of […]
How Do You Handle Your Cash Reserves?
Here comes some advice for all of us to use in business or in our personal lives. But to understand it, we need to delve into the short-and long-term sources and uses of cash. Good cash strategies to remember It is tempting to use available cash in good times to build the business and in […]
