Great frontline leaders create great experiences for their employees. This flows immediately and directly to customers. And then it flows to the top and bottom lines.
Frontline Leaders Help Our Firms Go and Grow
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The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Leadership Caffeine™: Motivate with Context
We waste fortunes inside our organizations on misguided programs and oddball incentives, seeking ways to motivate and inspire people to work hard, innovate, create, care and to live up to their potential, when the real solution is literally on the tip of our tongues. Here are 5 ideas for curing Context Deficit Disorder:
Coming Soon: A Saturday Serial & A View from the Millennial Perspective
During the next few weeks, I will kick off two new features here on the blog. The first will be a Saturday Management Serial…an on-going story involving fictional firms and companies and the buffet of leadership, management and business issues that require solving by you, the readers. The second new feature will offer a view from the youngest generation in the workforce on the realities of leading, managing and developing a career. We’ve heard a great deal from the 40-something management group on the challenges of leading the generations…now, we’ll hear the story from the other side of the age fence. Coming soon!
Want to Change the World? Don’t Forget to Build Your Business Model
Over the past few weeks, I’ve connected with some brilliant individuals in multiple entrepreneurial organizations. In every instance, I heard some form of “We want to change the world” as these high-energy individuals described their ideas and their motivation. I love “change the world ideas” put forth by people passionate about doing something new, doing something better and helping others along the way. There’s no way I can avoid cheering for these teams. However, I can worry for them. Here’s why…
Management Week in Review-January 7, 2011
One of my professional goals this year is to do a better job sharing insights and perspectives from a broad range of great leadership and management writers and thinkers. Every Friday, I will share my three favorites for the week. This week, I’m including content on transforming yourself, testing your strategy and turning some of the disasters of 2010 into great lessons for 2011. Enjoy!
Rethinking Idea Generation
Idea generation is core to everything we do in our organizations. It’s too bad that we’ve been going about it all wrong!
Management Excellence Book Review: Management? It’s Not What You Think
I confess to having a proclivity for essay collections when it comes to reading about management. Essays move along quickly and they offer the reader the opportunity to capture quick sound bites over breakfast, on the train or in other ideal reading rooms. Also, there’s the reality that many management books struggle to adequately fill the space between the book-covers, offering up their best in the introduction, the first chapter and the wrap-up chapter. Here are my thoughts on: Management? It’s Not What You Think! by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel.
Management Excellence Book Series: Six Disciplines Execution Revolution with Gary Harpst
I started this book series to share the insights and approaches of some truly sharp people on solving vexing business problems. This particular interview with Gary Harpst, author of, Six Disciplines Execution Revolution and the earlier Six Disciplines for Excellence, taps into Gary’s hard won, practical experience and his great ideas on helping small and mid-sized businesses deal with strategy execution. Enjoy the thoughtful, actionable and experience-tested guidance from Gary in our podcast interview!
10 of My Favorite Dumb Ass Management Mistakes
In the spirit of my post, “At Least 20 Things to Stop Doing as a Leader,” which has grown well north of 50 thanks to a deluge of reader comments, I’m back with a list of some insanely stupid and all-too-common management mistakes. These focus more on the decisions, actions or inactions that contribute to creating even bigger problems. While I’ve remained on the positive side of the law here (felons, you’ve had your day!), some of these mistakes are truly criminal. Please feel free to chime in with your additions.
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.”