Three Ways To Shoot Yourself In The Foot: Part III, The Consolidation Phase
The consolidation phase that follows the Avalanche is tough on everyone. Your people are worried about keeping their jobs—and many of them are probably already looking elsewhere. You’ve tried to introduce new processes and patch your sagging IT, but nothing’s working the way it should. Morale has bottomed out. But look at it this way: Your business’s needs are pretty [...]
Three Ways To Shoot Yourself In The Foot, Part II: The Avalanche
The Business Storm Cycle is never still; like all cycles, it’s constantly turning. If you’ve weathered your first rapid-growth Tornado, in which your people and resources were stretched to the breaking point, you probably wondered when this crazy phase of expansion would stop. Now, as the Avalanche of shrinking margins and overstocked inventory hits, it has. As it turns out, [...]
Three Ways To Shoot Yourself In The Foot, Part I: In The Tornado
No matter where you are in what I call the Business Storm Cycle, as a leader you’ve got to lead—even when the way ahead looks foggy. But even experienced leaders can be blindsided by what comes at them in the cycle—and can make mistakes that will make the phase they’re in that much rougher or even prove fatal to their [...]
Telecommuting Takes Alignment
How big a deal is telecommuting? Bigger by the day, especially if you’re working for or running a large company. And as business leaders and employees get more comfortable with the idea that telecommuters can be highly productive working from home, it’s going to get even bigger. Global Workplace Analytics’ research finds that: 50% of the US workforce holds a job [...]
Are You A Tech Wreck?
You may be, if you don’t understand the defining differences between how your employees interact with your IT and how your customers interact with your IT. In the first instance, your employees are tasked with understanding your IT system and how to use it. They’ve most likely been trained on how to harness it to make processes and workload flow [...]