Steve McKee
Your business does not have a brand; your brand has a business. That may sound odd, backward, even heretical, but it’s true.
Consider the smartphone on which you may be reading this. When it was...
Jack Dunigan
Graham was a salesman of specialty products with a proven record of success. His many years of experience had yielded a high degree of confidence in himself and the products he sold, and an advanced...
Wendy White
Starting a new facility in the food-processing industry is an enormous undertaking. There are thousands of things that must be accomplished, from hiring and training new staff to ordering and...
Henrik Bresman
A leading supermarket chain in an eastern European Union country feared an 8-percent drop in sales as discounting giant Lidl was about to enter its market. So, in collaboration with researchers, it...
Eric Stoop
In 1982, W. Edward Deming’s Out of the Crisis (MIT Press, 2000 reprint) outlined 14 points by which companies could learn from his success in helping to drive the industrial boom of post-World...
Kevin Meyer
When legendary CEO Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines passed away Jan. 3, 2019, many articles memorialized him, including this one by Bill Taylor in the Harvard Business Review and this one by Mark...
Lolly Daskal
When we think of leaders, we don’t often think of failures, but one of the hallmarks of the best leaders is knowing how to fail well.
Successful people are those who have failed at something—and in...
Brad Egeland
In case you haven’t heard this one before, “I’m big in Japan” is a way of boosting yourself in some unverifiable fashion. Specifically, it means, “To say or pretend you are someone of stature...
Harish Jose
The TV show The Walking Dead, about survival in a post-apocalyptic zombie world, is one of the top-rated currently. I’ve written previously about the show, but today I want to briefly look at...
Hamish Knox
Have you ever heard a leader say, “I thought they knew what they were supposed to do?” Have you ever said that about those you lead? Either situation should make us cringe.
Leaders’ No. 1 job is to...
Innovating Service With Chip Bell
Visioning beyond the customer is the responsibility of every person interested in a competitive advantage.
What do Bill Marriott, Ray Kroc, and Al Hopkins have in common?
No, they are not all people...
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
We interview Stanley Chao, author of Selling to China: A Guide for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (iUniverse, 2018), about the impact of the current U.S.-China trade war. Does China really care,...
Burl Stamp
Having goals is critical to making progress, but strong organizational goals are not the same as effective work team or employee goals. Getting that distinction clear can accelerate progress for...
Wolfgang Ulaga
Offering free services may seem like a good way to keep customers happy, but how much money is your business leaving on the table? By redefining freebies as paid opportunities, B2B firms can generate...
Stanley Chao
This past year has created havoc for Western companies purchasing raw materials, furniture, high-tech components, auto parts, and power tools from China. And the rocky relationship continues into...
Manfred Kets de Vries
The global wellness industry is doing superbly, thank you very much. In recent years, it grew a healthy 12.8 percent, becoming a $4.2 trillion market. Whether the lives of wellness consumers are...
Shobhendu Prabhakar
Why do we waste our time and effort completing checklist after checklist for tasks that we can complete even when half awake? Do we not have better things to do than complete checklists?
Good...
Mike Monroe
“It's amazing what you can accomplish as long as you don't care who gets credit.”
Harry Truman spoke those words, and they quickly became a mantra for competitive teams. Great players want to play...
Ryan E. Day
Machine-tool manufacturer Cincinnati Inc. has a heritage of building quality products and surviving great challenges. Founded in 1898, and based in the United States, Cincinnati has survived both the...
Eric Cooper
Due dates. Whether it’s building a house or implementing an enterprise quality management software (QMS) solution, everyone has them, everyone wants them. What does home construction have to do...
