Related Articles

Employee Motivation: Make Everyone A Cheerleader For Your Company
Do you manage by walking around? What do you see? People excited about their job or people just going through the motions? Here are seven ways, that do not cost much if anything, to turn the "it's just a job" employee into one that is powered up and willing to give their best every day.Spend time out in the field.

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Quick Tip - Effective Meetings Begin With Goals
Goals are critically important for the success of a meeting. You must know what you want so you can ask for it.

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How to Fire an Employee
One of the most difficult tasks you will face as a business owner will be firing employees. Employees who consistently break the rules, do not perform the functions of their job, or cause difficulties for your business can be a strain on the work environment, your cash flow, and even disrupt your business from thriving and performing as expected.

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First Things First -- Process BEFORE Technology
Here's a brief story I encountered while leaving Newark International Airport following a recent business trip. Hard to believe, but true.

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Five Ways to Increase Profitability By Doing The Right Thing
1. Base your business in the Magic Triangle.

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Success at Work : People Skills : Dealing with New Ideas
Re-organizing, re-engineering, re-training, down-sizing, outsourcing, changing-changing-changing. Organizations today think they need to be constantly changing or they will perish.

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Service Level Agreement (SLA) Boot Camp
Service Level Agreements, or "SLA's" are tricky but useful mechanisms for managing the risk of an on-going relationship with IT service providers. Unfortunately, most SLA's that show up in service contracts as worthless, cosmetic paper additions.

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Budgets!
Budgets! There I've said it. For some the most hated and feared word in business.

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People Skills: Eight Essential People Skills
Being able to communicate effectively with others requires people skills, and here's eight essential ones:1. Understanding people People not only come in all shapes and sizes, but they come with different personality types as well.

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Employee Orientation: Get New Hires Off To a Great Start
The good news is that a new hire orientation program offers an opportunity to build a lasting impression of the new company. The bad news is that that is going to happen whether you plan it or not.

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Close the Performance Gap
One of the most difficult and emotionally draining situations you face as business owners or executives is employees not meeting your expectations. How can you handle it if they are not keeping up their end of the employee contract?Begin by taking a look at your team.

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Corporate Governance for Business Owners
It is clear that good Corporate Governance is in the best interests of shareholders of public companies, but how can it benefit shareholders of private companies and other business owners?Will a good system of corporate governance increase the bottom line?One of the elements of a good system of corporate governance is ensuring that the role, and the boards' expectations, of management are understood.SeparationSeparation of the board and management is often lacking when it comes to small medium sized enterprises.

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Make Change Easy - Get Involved!
There are wild variances in how much involvement organisations are brave enough to offer their people in change. From those organisations where they just 'tell' (sometimes by text message even!), to the most enlightened extreme, where they enable wholesale contribution to the change process.

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Innovation Management - Time to Market or Time to Success?
Creativity can be defined as problem identification and idea generation whilst innovation can be defined as idea selection, development and commercialisation.There are other useful definitions in this field, for example, creativity can be defined as consisting of a number of ideas, a number of diverse ideas and a number of novel ideas.

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Ringing Doorbells Without Howitzers
Many operations leaders have been there, done that with re-engineering. And they report, in effect, that the process is like ringing a doorbell with a howitzer shell.

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Building Trust in Your Business Relationships - 10 Steps
There are some simple things you can do with your people to ensure that they start to trust you. As a letter from Mike Emmott of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in the UK says, in April 2005's UK Management Today says:-"Our surveys show that only one in four employees trust senior management to look after their interests"Is that not appalling? How on earth can businesses develop, survive and above all hang onto their best people if they are seen to be untrustworthy?It's horrible.

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To Thine Own Self Be True--Its Better for Business: What Arthur Andersen Would Say to His Company
As a child, you probably heard, "to thine own self be true." But what does that really mean? When the newspapers are full of cheating and lying business owners, politicians, and academics, does it really make sense to maintain your integrity?To me, the answer is a clear, unwaffling YES! Without your integrity, you really don't have a business or a career--just a waiting game until you world comes crashing down around you.

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How to Create an Operations Manual
An operations manual can act as a tool for training employees and empowers them to your business running smoothly when you are out of the office. Though it may seem like a lot of work, the effort put into your operations manual can save you money that could otherwise be wasted on mishandled procedures and employee training time.

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Innovation Management - idea selection, development and commercialisation, what are the differences?
Creativity can be defined as problem identification and idea generation whilst innovation can be defined as idea selection, development and commercialisation.There are distinct processes that enhance problem identification and idea generation and, similarly, distinct processes that enhance idea selection, development and commercialisation.

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Business Innovation - Status Games
Creativity can be defined as problem identification and idea generation whilst innovation can be defined as idea selection, development and commercialisation.There are other useful definitions in this field, for example, creativity can be defined as consisting of a number of ideas, a number of diverse ideas and a number of novel ideas.

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