Leadership & Management

Leadership & Management

Why strategic advice from professionals can be sub-optimal for business owners?

Andrew Penny, May 14 2019

At a recent event organized by Peter Jaskiewicz at University of Ottawa and the Ontario CPA, the above participants each weighed in on a family business case study to provide succession advice based on their expertise. And while each piece of advice was excellent, I couldn’t help thinking about the old adage of  ‘when you have a hammer – everythin...

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Leadership & Management

What Should I Tackle Next?

Graham Birkenhead, May 8 2019

You have at least 10 projects sitting on your to-do list grinding away at you every day. Whatever you do, you feel you should be doing something else instead.  So, which one should you do next? There are only so many hours in a day, only so many people to help you get things done, and yet so much to do.  A question that crops up regularly from clie...

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Leadership & Management

The Great Unemployment Opportunity of 2019

Andrew Penny, March 26 2019

For this instalment of the accelerator we are going video.  Let us know what you think. Bottom Line:  If you find ways to help your clients reduce their labour needs, you can charge more, differentiate yourselves and create deeper customer relationships.

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Leadership & Management

Building the Culture to Accelerate

Graham Birkenhead, March 12 2019

Acceleration is all about going faster, and then going even faster, and then faster still.   If you look at a graph of acceleration – it shows that over time, your speed, or size, or revenue doesn't just get larger in a nice straight line, but it’s a line that curves upwards.  Now the thing is with acceleration, as opposed to a nice steady linear g...

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Leadership & Management

Are you Confusing Motion with Progress?

Graham Birkenhead, February 12 2019

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...

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Leadership & Management

The Art of Effective Delegation

Graham Birkenhead, November 6 2018

I 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.

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Leadership & Management

Welcome to the Accelerator

The Kingsford Team, October 23 2018

Einstein 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 (...

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Leadership & Management

It Sounds Absurd but Don't Motivate your Employees

Graham Birkenhead, July 2 2014

Following on from my blog about the Rock and the Bird, one astute reader asked me about the ‘careful’ way I had written about motivation and inspiration, and so I thought that would be a good point to expand upon for my next blog So, I encourage you ‘not to motivate your employees, don't even try to motivate them’. And why?  Well simply, it’s not y...

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Leadership & Management

The Rock and the Bird

Graham Birkenhead, April 15 2014

Have you ever wondered what the difference is between a leader and a manager? Which do you think you are? How can you tell? OK, so that was a bit of a red herring sort of question – I deliberately tried to mislead you, which is the whole point of this blog. Now, answer this question (not a red herring this time):  do you have anyone working for you...

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