You’ve seen the symptoms: A continuing decline in income. A dwindling customer base. Unconventional approaches being taken by opposition firms. A reluctance by those in control to admit there is a problem. Poor communication. A progressive departure of key people. Uncertainty, resulting in the organization freezing up. Why is there an insufficient or poor response by business leaders to the seemingly obvious? I believe it’s a combination of factors: People become complacent.  They learn to do a certain job, they become more proficient at it, and by putting their heads down and focusing on the job at hand, they become unaware of what’s happening around them.  They have reached a comfort zone in terms of their daily operations, and they →

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What are the needs of the current job going to be 5 years from now? There are executives that shy away from even considering what will happen after they depart from their organization. There are also many reasons some executives don’t want to address succession planning. Some of these executives subconsciously don’t want to give up what they have and what they are doing, rationalizing their decision away by saying that what they do is so unique that no other person on the face of the earth is capable of doing what they do. Someone I knew said their tombstone should read “He ensured the company’s demise.” Other executives are “frozen” and not able to take a decision on who →

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A Prescriptive management style incorrectly used ultimately harms most organizations. There is a direct link between good Leadership and performance. The Gallup organization’s research of more than 30 years that included 17 million employees, confirmed what good leaders have known instinctively: Involve your employees and you will profit. Ignore them and your organization will underperform. Studies show that when managers or leaders engage in a participatory management style, performance improves by nearly a third. If you involve your employees, listen to them, use many of their suggestions, earnings have been proved to increase significantly. Four times more employees resign because of poor managers than resign under good managers. Several years ago the Herzberg motivational theory basically concluded that recognition, increased →

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Determine where your business, organization or country is on the life cycle. Everything has a life cycle.  A person, a company, a country. Imagine this lifecycle as a bell shaped curve, and let’s relate this to all three of the above; a person, a company and a country. In every case there is a birth, a growth spurt, a teenage period, adulthood, midlife, later life, retirement and a death. The need to achieve is very evident in the early part of the upside of this curve.  A toddler tries to do everything.  He grasps at everything.  If he fails, he might try other ways to advance, but the need to perform and achieve is there.  The drive is to achieve, →

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Today’s environment is busy changing around us at such a speed that most of us are not even noticing these non-stop ongoing changes. We are often, not always, taken by surprise by an event that occurs in our external environment that we were not anticipating. I have seen people in business becoming experts at what they do in their business while the environment is changing around them at a rapid rate and that by the time they realize this, their business is almost obsolete. Such rapid change can be quite frightening.  The rate of rapid change is increasing dramatically. Examples abound: Is the country you are living in the same as even ten years ago?  Are you fully conversant with →

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For your health’s sake take the 10 point test.  Answer YES or NO to the following questions: 1) Have you reached the stage where you can no longer distinguish between what is a problem and what is a catastrophe? 2) Have you found you are almost unable to stop working – even minor tasks have become critically important? 3) Have you become more intolerant or even aggressive lately? 4) Have you become more resentful? 5) Have you become more cynical or even depressed? 6) Are you taking these attitudes home with you every day and your family is experiencing this negative spillover each day from you? 7) Has your level of perfectionism increased to an obsessive state? 8) Are your close relationships deteriorating? 9) →

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