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Leadership Caffeine™—Breakaway Leadership Part 2

Post number 1 in this series focused on the behaviors that often stifle the pursuit of moving into a new area while sustaining the legacy business. In this post, we look at 8 behaviors and approaches that YOU and your management counterparts directly control that contribute to success with this challenging endeavor:

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A Great Product Manager

Someone asked me about the importance of product management in my prior tech businesses. My answer was blunt. Great product managers see beyond customer requirements to the often unspoken needs, and they move organizational mountains to fill those needs.

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Next! Call for Interviews: Product & Project Managers & Organizational Integrators

When chatting with leadership author and expert, John Baldoni, on the Leadership Caffeine Podcast (published on itunes last week), I asked him which of his books was his favorite. I loved his response…”The one I’m working on now.”

I’m just a few weeks away from the publication of book #2 for me, a collection of essays organized into helpful…self-help sections for professionals striving to survive and succeed (Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development), and try as I might to resist the urge to do this again (right away), I have to have a book in process in my life. Next! Bring on the Organizational Integrators and Informal Leaders!

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Marketers: 4 Ideas to Avoid Falling Victim to The Felt Need

The article, “The Felt Need” by Dan and Chip Heath in the November, 2010 issue of Fast Company is worth the price of the annual subscription for it’s reminder value alone. The Heaths tackle a topic that just about all of us involved in selling, marketing or strategy have succumbed to at some point in our careers: the felt need versus the burning need. Here are four ideas to avoid being victimized by “The Felt Need.”

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Leadership Caffeine™: The Noble Pursuit of Power and Influence

Power and influence are not dirty words. Both are components of every organization’s environment and both must be carefully cultivated to succeed as a formal or informal leader. Power and influence provide the motive power behind organizations and initiatives and the lubrication that keeps the parts and people from binding and grinding and self-destructing. Here are 6 key reasons why cultivating power and influence is good for your career.

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The Career Enhancing Benefits of Message Mapping

The Career Enhancing Benefits of Message Mapping

Critical and challenging communication situations demand crystal clarity. The discipline of message mapping is a powerful, simple-to-learn approach to helping you and your teams achieve clarity and consistency with your most difficult and strategic communication situations. 

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Leadership Caffeine™: Learning to Adjust Your Altitude

While the phrase is most commonly referenced as attitude adjustment, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that one of the abilities that leaders must develop to be effective is the ability to adjust their altitudes. Good leaders learn to scale institutional and intellectual heights with ease and comfort, quickly adapting to the audience and situation.

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Leadership Caffeine™-Teach Your Team to Make Better Decisions

If you were to embark upon a rugged and lonely journey to the top of the mountain to ask for enlightenment from the Oracle of Management, I suspect that you would be left with the words “decision-making” to ponder on your long walk back to civilization. And in spite of the lack of a concrete answer from this journey, I’ll throw in my two-cents worth that decision-making is in fact the essence of management. It’s also darned hard to do, difficult to teach and challenging to get right more often than not.

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