How to Identify the Most Dangerous Person in Your Company

If you’ve read this column for a while, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I tell people that intelligence is learning from your own mistakes. This means intelligence is painful, and it often leaves lumps and a bruised ego. Wisdom, on the other hand, is learning from other people’s mistakes. Wisdom…

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6 Tips for Staying Energized in Your Business

Being a small business owner is tough work, trust me on this one. There are a multitude of tasks that need to be done every day to ensure your business stays running smoothly and efficiently. In order to keep up with your business and the high demands of being an owner, there are quite a…

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How to Think Like a Growth CEO

Growth CEO’s differ from those who merely station—keep their way into the status quo, protecting the enterprise by reducing risk and cost, without creating a vision and action plan for growth. Here is a way to test yourself with a tool useful for any leader seeking to create positive change. Authors Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Oglivie…

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A Good Resolution: Schedule Regular Management Meetings

It’s not too late to schedule your monthly management meetings for this year. Use some regular meeting schedule such as the third or fourth Thursday of every month. Review your business plan milestone dates, deadlines, tasks, plan vs. actual results, and upcoming milestone dates and deadlines. All the managers committed to the plan will know way…

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5 Steps to Create a Culture of Leadership

In a previous article, we discussed some ideas on how to assess leaders and their capacity to lead. Now let’s discuss some of the steps required to create a culture of leadership. Creating a culture of leadership is a key component in your companies’ ability to grow year over year. It is not something that can be…

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How Entrepreneurs Overcome Fear

I’ll let you in on a little secret: Entrepreneurs are scared. They are scared of failing. They are scared of getting fired or losing control. They are scared of not being able to close a deal. They are scared of letting their family, friends or investors down. They are scared that their cynical professor was…

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Organizations are Reflections of Leaders’ Priorities

I have lots of different conversations with sales executives. They cover any number of issues: “Dave, how do I get our people to use the sales process?” “My people aren’t using the tools we provide them….” “We need to be more customer focused….” “We need to create and communicate our value more effectively…..” “We need…

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Is Your Leadership Limiting Your Organization’s Ability to Grow?

Leadership capacity is more than simply skill development; it’s about performance, growth, transformation and change. For the purpose of our discussion in this series of articles, let’s define it as; “Leadership Capacity is the skillful use of leadership attributes for the growth and development of ourselves, our colleagues and our organization.” Great leaders not only…

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