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Regaining Control - Nine Steps for New Managers
My client had faced the same challenge, which was frustrating as well as intimidating for him as well - yet he was determined to break the mould.With my background in a similar business, I have faced this several times.

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Eight Skills of Highly Successful Consultants
With deference to Dr. Covey and his very popular Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (all habits that will make us better consultants!), here are eight skills that all of us as consultants can work on to improve.

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Tales from the Corporate Frontlines: Finding The Perfect 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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What You Should Know if People Dont Buy From You and People Dont Visit Your Web Site
It is essential to understand what work and what do not work when you run business, especially through Internet.1.

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Creativity and Innovation Management - Money Doesnt Do It
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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ISO 9001 and Total Quality Management
Total Quality ManagementTotal Quality Management, or TQM, has become one of the most frequently discussed topics in current business literature. Because of the competitive pressures created by Japanese companies, quality became a competitive weapon in the 1980s in most industries.

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Project Management - The Traveling Product Manager
Various studies - and common sense - indicate that involving customers increases the likelihood that your product will meet customer requirements (I hope these studies weren't funded with my tax dollars!)Although the above statement sounds exceedingly obvious, the fact of the matter is many software projects lack customer input. Consider the following example:Week 0: Red, our friendly project mangler, is in charge of the next release of his organization's flagship product.

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Protect Your Organizations Proprietary Information
The other day one of our overseas clients called in a state of near panic, to ask a question. At issue was whether they had unwittingly violated U.

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Meetings and Road Trips
Managing a meeting is like setting off on a long car trip with friends or family. You need to plan your route, pay attention to the rules of the road, consider what will keep your passengers engaged and occupied, and always remember you have to get back home at the end.

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Six Sigma Training 101 - Better Management Basics
What is Six Sigma?Six Sigma is a quality management program that is designed to achieve a "six sigma" level of quality for products. In the mid 1980s, Motorola pioneered Six Sigma and it has since been adopted by many other companies and manufacturers.

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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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5 Tips For Creating Great Jobs
1) Create A Powerful "Mission Statement"-When your business mission is clear, every part of your business will improve, because you have a clear, definite major purpose. You will more easily attract people that believe in your mission.

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Knowledge Management - Creating a Sustainable Yellow Pages System
How can I "know who knows" None of us can personally know more than around 250 people, yet we want our companies to be smart, learning organisations where it's easy to find the right person to talk to. This is why many organisations create "yellow pages" applications, which enable employees to find and contact other staff with particular expertise and skills.

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Can Your Corporate Policy Pass the Monkeys, Bananas, and Water-spray Experiment?
Five monkeys were placed in a cage. A banana was hung on a string and a ladder was placed below it.

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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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Use QA As Your First Step To Outsourcing
Quality Assurance, or QA, is often given short shrift in a software development organization, especially when budgets are tight. When debating the software development budget at one of my software companies, the CEO finally asked, "Well, do you really want to hire a QA guy, or a programmer to add features to the software?"It was a tough choice.

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Are Your Meetings Smart?
Soon after I finished a brief seminar on how to accomplish more in less time every day, Roger shook my hand and said, "I can use what you said. But there is one thing you didn't talk about.

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Selecting Top Talent: Improve Your Batting Average
I recently gave a presentation to a group of business and community leaders on how to select talent to grow their organization. Given the expense associated with recruiting top performers and the high cost of making poor choices, you would think that those responsible for hiring would follow a systematic process that results in high quality hiring.

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How You Can Learn to be a Better Manager
When you first take over a department, expectations are usually high but operations are sometimes in disarray. The staff is disorganized, goals aren't being met, and hours are spent on unproductive tasks.

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Conflict at 36,000 ft
This was supposed to be one of those sleepy flights that leaves late, crosses two time zones, and arrives at 11:00 p.m.

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