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 [...]
I ‘ve walked by this sign more times than I can count and I finally had to take a picture. I know from talking to the manager’s that their desire is, understandably, to sign clients to a one year membership. However, they do not have too many takers – most clients are selecting the six [...]
I’ve seen this scenario, and it drives me bonkers.
Two people pitch their ideas to insert appropriate decision maker: upper management, venture capitalists, city council, and if you could put them on mute and study the ideas objectively you would see that one is clearly superior. The problem is that on more than one occasion, [...]
Project management is a discipline that offers a lot of value outside of managing “projects”. Many managers fail to see its advantages, claiming “I don’t have a project, I manage a department and its not finite”, or “project management is all about process and its too time consuming and resource intensive”.
To the first point, I [...]
From the July 2009 issue of FastCompany Magazine came Adam Werbach’s list of Nature’s 10 Simple Rules for Business. I thought they were worth repeating.
From the emerging fields of biomechanics and biomimicry, scientists are decoding rules that businesses can apply so they become as hardy and long lasting as a forest. Nature, after all, has [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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