Last week I interviewed a sales person at one of my clients. I was trying to get a sense for how well the organization is working and to identify the biggest opportunities. After a few minutes of conversation, I asked: What could we do to help you increase sales? The response: Well, I’ve really been…
I frequently hear people say “This product/service/business isn’t making any money, but it’s ‘strategic’.” When used in that sense, ‘strategic’ is frequently a code word for something else, such as: This thing is losing money –and we don’t know how to make it make money. We know it isn’t making money and it never will…
Creating context is an essential and tremendously powerful leadership and management concept to understand and to utilize. Context is defined as “the part of a text or statement that surrounds a particular word or passage and determines its meaning”. It comes from the Latin contextere meaning to join together or to weave. The key idea…
When I was a kid, I loved to watch reruns of The Little Rascals. In my favorite episode, “Two Too Young,” Alfalfa must recite the famous poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade. In this poem, Lord Tennyson memorializes the disastrous and suicidal charge of a British light cavalry brigade during the Crimean War. In…
I’ve had a series of separate but similar conversations in the past few weeks with several clients on the subject of pricing. These clients are: Professional service providers in different industries Extremely good at what they do – among the best in their field and highly differentiated . . . Operating at full capacity –…
