Practical Business Information for Owners & Entrepreneurs
When It Feels Wrong To Be Right – Trust Your Gut – Entrepreneur.com Interesting article opens with: “‘I trust my gut.’ That sounds so alpha-male cool, I know. It’s also a very dumb approach to running the major aspects of your business.” Perhaps not only “alpha-male cool” – women call it intuition, men call it […]
It may be a fact of life for your business. To keep your doors open, you may have had to furlough or even lay off some employees. No one likes to do that. Even when you jettison marginal performers, no one enjoys the process, least of all the business owner.
If it DOES happen to you, are you aware that the layoff isn’t the end of the process? What about those employees who are still with you? Oh, they’re lucky to have a job, you might say. But they are scared no matter what you say or do – and who can blame them?
To protect your business, you need to take several more affirmative steps. Most won’t cost you any money, but they do require effort and caring.
How to Innovate in a Downturn – WSJ.com What do nylon, Hewlett-Packard and the iPod have in common? Would you believe they all launched during a major financial downturn? Excellent article by Harvard B School Prof and McKinsey partner Bhaskar Chakravorti from the Wall Street Journal, chastening entrepreneurs that this is NOT the time to […]
Plotting a Smooth Course When You Take the Helm – WSJ.com One of our clients is adding a COO to his firm, someone to focus on running the business while he concentrates on being the “visionary” and the face of the firm. So this Wall Street Journal article with tips for incoming CEOs to smooth […]
Scrum for Social Media Although this is an article specific to Social Media (a current passion!), there are some very practical and simple lessons for managers wanting a structured process to get things done thoroughly and quickly. No, the two are not mutually exclusive. It’s about FOCUS and ACCOUNTABILITY. Of yes, and if you happen […]
Nearly everyone would agree that accountability is important to successful business management. How many have identified it as a critical component to growth? Virtually every one of our small business owner clients encounters it as a common symptom while they are trying to go from a micro business to a small business, or from small […]
Social media – those invitations to be a friend on Facebook, to connect via LInkedIn, Tweets on Twitter – all those and many, many more comprise this new area of marketing communications. We are planning a workshop on this in Atlanta for next month geared to Small Business Owners, and including marketing strategies all the […]
Practically Speaking – Small Businesses Critical of Stimulus Bills – NYTimes.com If you’re a small business owner, chances are this headline resonates. The author of this NYTimes article quantifies the sense that many of us have had about the stimuli under discussion: “only 0.05 percent of the House bill is dedicated to small-business lending programs, […]
How Obama’s SBA Chief May Change the Agency – BusinessWeek: ” Good overview article in Business Week about an Obama appointment. Karen Mills has good Corporate business roots, coming from family business Tootsie Roll (no joke!) to earning a Harvard MBA (we Kellogg alums will try not to hold that against her), then tours at […]
2009 Will Be an Economic Engine for Change Interesting article from HBR Online, predicting the coming year will be “an economic engine for change.” Author Jeff Stibel offers some historical examples supporting his point that economic upheavals create the greatest opportunities. I rather like his analogy with forest fires as a necessary part of nature’s […]