Related Articles

Its All About The Customers, Baby
If you want to ensure a steady stream of customers in your business, you must always remember why you're in business in the first place.Sure you want to earn a decent income for yourself, but you also want to provide a useful service don't you?That second reason should take precedence over the first.

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Problem-Solving Success Tip: Whatever You Do, Do It on Purpose
Decision-making shows up throughout the problem-solving process. The decisions may be difficult or unpopular, so it's very tempting to ignore some of them.

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Provisioning/User Management System Upgrades: Part I -- Ten Reasons Why Not To Do An Upgrade
Tommy Sherman daily monitors a helpdesk-provisioning queue for a large company. The current provisioning/user management system was written with homegrown software.

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Dealing with Marginal Performers: The Therapeutic Approach
--PREPARATION: The purpose of the therapeutic approach is to spark an employee toward improved performance through counseling. The manager's goal is to help the employee recognize the existence of a problem, accept the need for change, and formulate his or her own program for improvement.

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How to Leverage Your Strengths for Peak Performance
Ask almost any business leader how to most effectively develop people and build teamwork and you'll hear, "tap into employees' strengths." Yet when it comes to their own careers, many managers still focus the majority of their personal development efforts on shoring up areas of weakness.

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Relationship Building - 5 Tips and 5 Questions
And is isn't hard - it's more about focusing on people, who they are and what interests them. And that's just where you spend your time.

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Don't Get Down - Manage Up!
"Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." - Aldous HuxleyEver have one of those supervisors that just didn't quite get it?Perhaps you even wondered from time to time how in the world this person ever became a manager in the first place?The truth is that most of us, at some point in our career, will experience this firsthand.

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Five Strategies for Profitable Services Growth
In today's era of Professional and IT Services competition and consolidation, some small to medium-sized companies are proudly delivering 20%-50% annual growth.Unfortunately, the vast majority of firms have experienced two consecutive years of fee erosion, commoditization, client defection, and company identity crises.

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Gift Giving for Business a Major Headache
Corporate gifting is a big headache for most business owners; how much to spend, who to spend the money on, where to get the gifts, what to get and how to gauge the effect of that giving in terms of benefits for the company are all important questions. When a company decides to give gifts it needs to be planned out as part of doing business, not just a last minute impulse.

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Think Twice Before Selling ROI
When we're selling to business people, our value proposition has to show a good return. Solid, credible Return On Investment (ROI) calculations are supposed to prove this for us.

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Listening Strategically
Usually, we're most interested in communicating outwardly; getting our messages out to others. But finding ways to hear what's going on around us can be just as important.

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Travel the World - for Free!
I have been very fortunate to travel to several countries of the world while on business - countries I may have never visited on a holiday. There are pros and cons to working/doing business in a foreign country vs.

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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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Use Noncompete Agreements To Protect Your Business
Q: One of my former employees has launched an online business very similar to mine and is contacting my clients and trying to steal their business from me. Do I have any legal recourse against him? -- Brad J.

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Innovation Management - Eliciting Dominant Ideas
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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Three Ways to Transmit Loud and Clear
The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart. --Benjamin FranklinHow often have you said something that you thought was perfectly clear, only to find out later that the receiver had taken it in exactly the wrong way? A boss's ability to communicate well with direct reports depends on the capacity to transmit meaning between people through the use of words.

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Employee Turnover: Seven Reasons Why People Quit Their Jobs
There are many reasons why good employees quit and go to another company, perhaps even your competitor. Most of the reasons start with management and most are preventable.

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Creativity and Innovation Management - Competition versus Collaboration
There is much confusion as to whether competition or collaboration is most beneficial to creativity and innovation. Though there are negatives to collaboration and it is not easy separating the effects of time pressure and group activity, in general collaboration beats competition.

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4 Tips on How to Avoid Communication Lines Breakdown
For example, in a small, two-person company, there is often the greatest opportunity for direct conversation and discussion throughout the day. There are only two possibilities for verbal communication and it's usually quick, easy and descriptive.

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Tales from the Corporate Frontlines: Employee Ideas Achieve Work Life Balance
This article relates to the Work/Life Balance competency, which investigates how your staff feels with regard to the balance between work and personal life. It explores issues such as priority of family and hours on the job, also covered in this competency.

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