On my journey home over the weekend on a busy highway, I was able to watch the driving style of another driver. We joined the highway together – I noticed him because he was in the wrong lane and squeezed into the on ramp behind me. We slipped into the traffic stream and went on our way. A minute later, his car went flying past me on the right...
Read MoreI ask all our clients for a report on sales by customer for the last 2 or sometimes 3 years; but even a single year (as the example below shows) provides great insights. And, with multiple years you also get trends. Next, I do something that is incredibly simple but provides huge insights. I load the data into a spread-sheet, sort by revenue (lar...
Read MoreIf you are in business, you have stakeholders. They are all the people that have an interest in what you are doing or could be affected by what you are doing. At a recent Stakeholder Management workshop that I was running we were wrapping up and it was question time. There is always some bright spark that asks the question that attempts to cram a...
Read MoreLegacy Constraints are the Achilles' Heel of enterprise companies; they are your opportunity. One of our clients is a rapidly growing software as a service (SAAS) company. We are helping them on their way to becoming a global company - which of course takes money. Our initial evaluation showed there were a number of billion-dollar companies that ap...
Read MoreI was chatting with a friend the other day, explaining a little more about what I do when he stopped me and said: “I keep hearing that term - what exactly do you mean by end-to-end and why do you talk about it all the time?” Once you are exposed to end to end (e2e) it comes naturally but it can take a while to grasp the subtleties. e2e is core to...
Read MoreDuring a kick off meeting with a new client we were discussing how best to accelerate beyond his local trading area. We talked about geography, product lines and market segments. When I suggested he focus on a very specific offering for a unique demographic his comment was – “Geez – that market is way too small”. He was confusing small for narrow;...
Read MoreI was talking with one of our fast-growing coaching clients the other day. Inevitably, with growth comes a little pain. The current pain for this CEO was that he had to let go of some control, and hand more responsibility to his staff so that he could spend less time in the business and more time on the business. It's not an unusual situation.
Read MoreEinstein once said that the definition of insanity was to keep doing the same thing over again and expecting the result to be different. We have been posting blogs for many years – sometimes more consistently than at other times, but on the whole, we have been sharing glimpses of our extensive knowledge of how businesses operate, grow and succeed (...
Read MoreCarolanne decided to make an investment in Swedish furniture. And pretty soon she was sitting on her living room floor surrounded by cardboard, fiddly connectors, sheets of gleaming white melamine, Allen keys galore and sheets and sheets on iconic instructions. But, despite the instructions (in multiple languages and pictograms), it wasn’t going w...
Read MoreTwo hours later than expected, a large dump truck backed slowly up my driveway. It’s annoying beep-beep-beep back-up alarm making the dogs bark. Once it was in front of the garage doors the bed started to lift and a full cord of firewood cascaded onto my driveway. I now had to shift and stack ½ ton of firewood before I could get my cars out and my...
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