A recent Harvard Business Review article states that in a downturn, (you should) provoke your customers. I have to say that even after reading the article to understand where they are coming from, this scares me a bit. It’s one thing to provoke a sleeping bunny, but what if you provoke a sleeping [...]
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Best practices are important because, as per Wikipedia, they can deliver desired outcomes with fewer problems and without unforeseen complications and do so more productively and at lower costs. Many organizations claim to employ them, and chances are that your organization falls into this group. But do you really employ best practices? [...]
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As my fellow blogger astutely pointed out last week in what is by far the best rant he’s ever penned, supply and spend management companies are approaching the recession in one of two ways. The minority camp is taking the correct approach and aggressively ramping their marketing, human capital acquisition, and new product development [...]
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In our last post, we talked about twelve smart things a smart company could do to avoid the graveyard that many of its dumb company peers are heading too in this down economy. Today, we’re going to talk about ten more smart things a smart company can do, courtesy of Christopher Lockhead who guest-posted [...]
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Last September, I introduced you to Kiva, the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending initiative in a post where I posed the question Can Micro-Finance Make a Macro-Difference? after being referred to the site by a fellow hoser. In an attempt to answer that question, I decided to conduct an experiment. Since [...]
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In Parts I, II, and III, we talked about all the dumb things that many a dumb company failing the CIRCUIT are doing on the path to ultimate failure. So today we’re going to do something different and talk about the smart things a company can do if it wants to get off of [...]
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After I penned CIRCUIT, Dumb Company, and Dead Company, but before I penned Dead Company II, Brian Soils authored a great post over on TechCrunch on how Fear Kills Busineses, Dead. Noting that recessions naturally inject fear and panic, Brian also noted that fear is not a catalyst for productivity. Fear, and the [...]
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Like my fellow bloggers, I talk to a lot of companies in the run of a week, and many more in the run of a month, and one thing I’ve been hearing too much of lately is “we’ve cut back on X” — where X is marketing, development, or outside consulting — “because we have [...]
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Get offa me! Away from me! Get me outa here! Don’t follow me! Don’t bother me! I’m no leader. from “Leader” on “Essentially Naked” by Bif NakedIn his latest article (Supply Management Transformation: A Leader’s Guide), Robert Rudzki of Transformation Leadership and Greybeard Advisors notes that he likes to ask two questions when [...]
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Industry week recently ran an article on how to recession proof your business by three authors that had a rather interesting take on how you go about this. According to the article, you start by identifying the tribes that constitute your business and determining where they are in their sociological progression. If they [...]
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