success

Your Phone is Now Your Bank: Are You Ready for Disruptive Innovation?

Does your bank fit inside your cell phone? If not, it soon will. And if today’s banks don’t come to terms with this fact very soon (as in starting yesterday), they may no longer exist in 10 or even five years. How’s that for disruptive innovation? I just finished reading Bank 3.0 —Why Banking Is…

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It’s Time to Engage with Employee Engagement

Time for me to get up on the soapbox again. I recently came across a survey conducted by SilkRoad, a “leading provider of cloud-based, social talent management solutions.” In other words, they do the human resources thing. Their survey polled nearly 800 HR professionals on a number of issues related to engaging and energizing employees…

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Taking the Mystery Out of Innovation

Many people see innovation as a mystifying process that requires blinding flashes of creative insight to come up with new products that change the world. In reality, there’s nothing mysterious about it. As defined in the dictionary, innovation is simply “making changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.” Those blinding…

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How to Suck at Leadership

Have you ever woken up in the morning and said to yourself, “I’m tired of being a good leader. Today, I want to suck at it.”? Well, today’s your lucky day! As someone who strives to keep up with the latest in leadership, it recently occurred to me we have tons of books, videos, blogs,…

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The Third, Fourth and Fifth Most Powerful Words in Business

When was the last time you got stuck, I mean really stuck, on a problem in your organization? The kind where you not only couldn’t find a solution, but weren’t even sure why you were stuck in the first place. For example, you’re way behind your annual sales goal and no one seems to know…

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Time For a 1st Quarter Checkup

A lot can happen in three months. The Vatican can elect a pope from Argentina. We can now carry knives through airport security. And Dennis Rodman can become BFF (best friends forever) with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. Who in the world saw that last one coming? Which begs the question: if all this…

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March Madness: It’s Winning Time!

I’m not a huge basketball fan. But like millions of Americans, I follow the annual event know as March Madness, where 68 college hoops teams come together over the course of three weeks to determine a true national champion. And when March Madness rolls around, it means two things. One, workplace productivity throughout the land…

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Prepare to Be Disrupted

A few months back, I wrote about how the current cycle of tech disruption is significantly faster and broader than previous cycles. As a result, new products and technologies are causing us to re-imagine almost everything we do in business and in daily life. Well, prepare to be disrupted, starting with where you spend most…

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Time For An Education System Makeover

Education budgets at the national, state, and local levels have all taken huge hits over the past few years. And while we all want our schools to have sufficient funding to educate our children, more money is not the magic bullet solution for what our educational system needs. The truth is, our educational system is…

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Are You a Strategy 10-Percenter?

I recently came across a disheartening statistic (from an IBM white paper on planning and implementation) that says only 10 percent of organizations manage to successfully implement their strategies on a consistent basis. My first reaction was, “That can’t be right; that’s too low!” But the more I thought about it, the more it matches…

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Slowing Down to Go Fast

Twenty-five years ago, fax machines – which took minutes to transmit one page of data and print it out on wax paper in barely legible text — were considered the height of communications technology. These big, bulky devices had to be plugged into an electrical outlet in order to function, and were not very portable….

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Winning: Your Best Time Management Tool

As a consultant and keynote speaker, I get to work with a wide variety of organizations. As you might imagine, I see a lot of different problems and challenges from one company to another, but I also see a lot of similarities. One of the core issues I find almost everyone struggling with these days…

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