Sagacious Think

In a previous post, I identified some of the advantages of using ratios to help gauge the health of an organization, including understanding how your organization compares not only to industry averages, but against the best you are up against.  The results may provide insight into areas of improvement, and areas where the company appears [...]

Most startups fail for one of the following reasons:
Poor Management Acumen
Many entrepreneurs start relatively early and consequently do not have a lot of management experience under their belt.  Often they are technical experts and lack business acumen, and either cannot or will not bring in the resources necessary for success.  This one is key, because [...]

Most of the times, start ups are heads down, focused on what they need to do to keep afloat and make it to that next milestone.  Every so often its good to come up for air and take stock of how you are doing compared to your competition, and your industry in general.  One way [...]

Delegate or dump?  Sometimes its hard to distinguish the two.  Often managers delegate the work they like the least as opposed to strategically assigning it.  In doing so, they’ve dumped the problems on others and walked away – its human nature after all, to avoid doing things we dislike.  But risks exist with simply passing [...]

A recent post by Seth Godin complaining (very insightfully) about dashboards got me thinking because so much of what I do involves helping clients understand their performance, and lot of times that means developing dashboards.  A typical scenario is that they want this tool to be the Mazerati of tracking, so they want every conceivable [...]

Feedback is essential to our development as professionals.  Yet for both the givers and receivers it can be painful.  For the receiver hearing their performance is less than stellar can be hard to take, and frankly is at odds with most companies rating systems of a bell curve,  which by definition means that the majority [...]

I came across this quick idea from Harvard Business School adapted from “Trouble Shoot Your Way to Recovery” by John Baldoni, and thought it very appropriate.  Too often we get caught up in coming up with an elaborate plan for resolution when what we really need is a simple, practical, methodical approach to resolve the [...]

If not, you are not alone – its an interesting alternative to other legal structures
What is a B Corporation (B stands for Benefit)?

meets transparent and comprehensive standards of social and environmental performance
legally expands their corporate responsibilities to include consideration for stakeholder interest
amplifes the voice of sustainable business and for-profit social enterprise through the power of [...]

Wire: BLOOMBERG News (BN) Date: 2009-04-23 04:01:00
Harvard’s Peso Doctor Vindicated as Chile Currency Evades Slump
By Sebastian Boyd

April 23 (Bloomberg) — Thousands of government workers marched on downtown Santiago last November, burning an effigy of Chilean Finance Minister Andres Velasco and calling him “disgusting” as a strike for higher wages paralyzed public services.  Five months later, polls show that Velasco [...]

The Economist has an article recently detailing the risk of corporate goal setting, and I found a great quote by the Academy of Management Perspectives, in the article noting that goal setting is widely considered “a benign, over-the-counter treatment” for improving corporate performance when in fact it is “a prescription-strength medication” that should be used [...]