Related Articles

The "Better People" Fallacy
It's easy enough to convince your own staff that better people will prevail, even against the odds. It's what they want to hear.

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Are You Cascading Your Strategy, or Fragmenting It?
INTRODUCTIONThe typical approach executive teams use to cascade, or roll out, their strategic direction is to produce a clear set of goals, objectives, critical success factors or a scorecard and then get each departmental or functional manager to take this on board and customize it for their part of the organisation. The trouble then begins?A TYPICAL APPROACH: EACH DEPARTMENT ADOPTS OR ADAPTS A VERSION OF THE CORPORATE STRATEGYThe first phase of most organisational planning processes is that the organisation's executives design and express a strategic direction using a framework of some kind.

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Forget The Sandwich Technique
Do you remember being told to use the "sandwich" technique when you needed to reprimand someone? Let me give you an example:"Fred, I'm really pleased with how you've been progressing since you joined us and you're doing a great job. However you're not getting your reports in on time and we're missing deadlines.

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Examining the Relationship Between Employee Satisfaction and Customer Satisfaction
Researchers have undertaken numerous studies to look at the connection between customer and employee satisfaction. A majority of these studies were able to uncover a correlation between employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction and profitability.

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Avoid These Seven Deadly Dangers Of Outsourcing
Here are seven dangers of outsourcing your software development. They become deadly if your career or entire company depends on the timely release of your software.

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Why Would Anyone Hold a Bad Meeting?
Pssst, want a stock tip that will make you rich? Okay, here it is: phone a public corporation and ask to speak with the CEO.If a secretary tells you that the CEO expects to be busy in meetings for the next six hundred years, call your broker and sell the stock short.

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Narcissism in the Boardroom
The perpetrators of the recent spate of financial frauds in the USA acted with callous disregard for both their employees and shareholders - not to mention other stakeholders. Psychologists have often remote-diagnosed them as "malignant, pathological narcissists".

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Give Yourself a Boss Day Gift, Part 2: Are You the Position or the Person?
Are you the position or the person?Bosses can lose their own identity sometimes. It's easy.

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Innovation Management - forced into it!
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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No Time to Focus on the Big Picture? Try Focus Management
E-mail, voicemail, "got a minute?" interruptions, multiple projects and competing priorities. Whether it is in work or in life, we all understand the importance of "seeing the forest for the trees.

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Power of Pinpointing Accountability
I have always said that if I were to write a book on effective management principles, the first chapter in that book would be about the importance of pinpointing responsibility among an owner's or a general manager's reporting units. After all, one of the most popular definitions of management is getting work done through others.

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Use Every Weapon You Have
One of the strongest weapons available allows business, non-profit and association managers to begin changing the behaviors of their key external audiences in ways that lead directly to achieving their primary operating objectives.The name of that weapon? The fundamental premise of public relations: People act on their own perception of the facts before them, which leads to predictable behaviors about which something can be done.

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Turbo Charge Your Career With The Most Powerful Leadership Tool Of All: The Leadership Talk: Part 1
Leaders speak 15 to 20 times daily. You speak at meetings, you speak across their desks, you speak on the phone, you speak in e-mails, you speak at lunch, beside the water cooler, and on elevators, etc.

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Training Adults, Not Teaching Children
Adults are vulnerable to personal and professional embarrassment from poor performance in the training program. Poor performance in the classroom may become the basis for personnel decisions by supervisors or the source of ridicule by peers.

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Getting to Consensus
The need to get people in an organization to pull together comes out often in discussions about communication.Let's think of it as getting to consensus, to roll a bunch of similar issues into one ball.

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Motivating For Higher Performance
Employee motivation is probably the most important single manageable factor for success and profitability of all the facets of specialty store retailing. It is too vital to be handled on a hit or miss basis, depending on the whim or spirit that stirs the store owner or manager from time to time.

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The Permissive Environment is the Suspect
The permissive and participatory conduct which most employees take for granted, eventually escalates into the more serious assaultive behavior commonly referred to as employee on employee workplace violence starts with innuendos, a bad word, or simple jokes taken out of context or used to inflame another. Initiation of a proper and thorough investigation is possible under the auspices of a Threat Assessment Team.

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Whadda Jerk!
If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.Carl JungSadly, public discourse today seems to have degenerated into warring parties spitting epithets at one another.

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Why You Need a Business Plan
This article was originally called "Do You Need a Business Plan?"The title was changed because in truth, every business needs a business plan. It's a common misconception that business plans are used only for raising capital, as in "my bank wants to see a business plan before they will approve a loan," or, "I need a business plan so I can get venture funding.

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Assessing Managers for International Competence
How do you select staff for international assignments? It's an important question because, no matter how effective and successful your employees may be at home, they cannot be guaranteed the same performance in a different culture-unless, that is, they can demonstrate some key competencies. But beware, these may be quite different from the competencies they need to succeed in their own environment.

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