Blog
Category: Leadership
Nice to get recognized for our work
On 29, Nov 2011 | In Branding, Leadership, Website Design | By Marcia K
Source: Jaw Drop Cooler Co Generally, we like to think the work we do for clients performs well and looks great. But great looks are – for us – always secondary to making sure the site performs well in terms of getting found, its conversion value, and optimization, the three things of importance to anyone who cares about generating leads, demand, and knows about inbound marketing. But yes… recognition is always nice. So it was very(!) nice to learn that the website and branding we did for our client Content Rules, the global content experts, was featured as one of the top 50 “jaw dropping” WordPress blogs by Kevin Leary. This was a collaborative effort …
True grit trumps intelligence
On 06, Aug 2009 | In Leadership | By Marcia K
True Grit trumps intelligence. Grit — the quality that allows a person to overcome setbacks — may be the most important predictor of success, researchers argue. Grit still isn’t well understood, but recent studies suggest that, unlike intelligence, grit can be learned or developed over time. Source The Boston Globe as reported on Smart Brief on Leadership
Don’t get mad – collaborate
On 29, Jul 2009 | In Leadership | By Marcia K
Source: Anger and its Impact on IQ I’ve often been heard to note that marketing is a collaborative sport. Recently, I was consulting to a company where members of the executive team resorted – more often than not – to yelling at each other. This seemed like disfunctional behavior so being a behaviorist, I decided to investigate. Sure enough I found this book – recommended by friend and colleague Mary Doan – called Radical Collaboration that notes a 20 point drop in IQ when people are angry. The implications of this are striking – at least for me. If you want to encourage collaboration – check your anger at the door. Collaboration yields better solutions …
Sharpen your business acumen
On 21, May 2006 | In Leadership | By Marcia K
Ram Charan, the noted consultant and prolific author on issues of strategy + execution notes that business acumen is a learned skill that starts with the abiilty to construct and act upon a mental model of the big picture. “The essence of the skill is to find patterns from among a wide variety of trends and to posit the missing ingredients that could catalyze convergence. Many great leaders began to practice this exercise when they were younger, in less complex contexts, and over the years they have developed the requisite skills and judgment.” To get started, he suggests you ask yourself and your colleagues a series of six questions: 1. What is happening in …
Priming the opportunity pipeline
On 17, Nov 2005 | In innovation, Leadership, Uncategorized | By Marcia K
A recent study by Imaginatik Research touts the concept of an Opportunity Pipeline for connecting corporate objectives to innovation. Some companies, upon discovery of a revenue growth gap, “embark on one-off innovation initiatives with the goal of boosting their pipeline of new products and services.” The problem here is that “innovation-on-demand” solutions rarely work over the long term and have the potential to distract companies from their core business. A better approach is to develop an Opportunity Pipeline—a portfolio of business opportunities that will close the gap over time. These opportunities are not just new technologies or product lines—they may entail a novel marketing approach, new process capability, new markets or something else. “The world’s …
More effective brainstorming
On 04, Nov 2005 | In Leadership, Uncategorized | By Marcia K
Thomas Kelley of design firm IDEO has a lot of experience in fostering effective brainstorming. He suggests allocating a specific space for innovation, well-stocked with sketch boards, maps, pictures and other stimulating visuals, as well as an abundance of post-it notes, prototyping kids, markers, story-board frames, etc. Practice the Zen principle of “beginner’s mind” and leave your preconceptions at the door. “Don’t judge, empathize.” Seek out epiphanies through “vuja de”—the sense of seeing something for the first time, even if it’s commonplace. Cross-pollinate: hire people with diverse backgrounds or even nationalities, create lots of opportunities for impromptu meetings among disparate groups, host a weekly speaker series to get creative juices perking, seek out diverse projects …
Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value
On 29, Aug 2005 | In Leadership, Uncategorized | By Marcia K
Tired of the negative, simplistic or “in the weeds” business books that wallow in the tactical at the expense of the big picture? Take heart and seek out a copy of the incisive and inspiring real-world vision of former Medtronic Chairman and CEO Bill George. A featured commentator on National Public Radio and a former Business Week “Top 25 Manager,” George does not offer up sweet-sounding vagaries in Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value. Instead, George delivers generous doses of wisdom that’s been tested in the boardroom, on Wall Street, and in some of the toughest and most competitive markets in the U.S. At the heart of George’s book is a call …
On the importance of two pizza teams
On 27, Sep 2004 | In Leadership, Uncategorized | By Marcia K
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos says the best way to keep good ideas percolating is to “do as many experiments per unit of time as possible. If you’re doing an experiment (that) costs $100 million and takes three years, well, you’re not going to be able to do very much innovation. If, on the other hand, you can organize in small, lightweight teams that have certain tools so they can do a lot of experiments per week or per month or whatever the right unit of time is, then you’ll get a lot more invention from that.” Bezos calls the ideal size team a “two-pizza” team: “To the degree that you can get people …
Diverse Teams Really Do Make Better Decisions
On 28, Apr 2004 | In Leadership, Uncategorized | By Marcia K
Despite advice to the contrary, even good managers often staff work teams with people inclined to think alike, creating “yes-man” teams that fail to make the kind of measured decisions that come out of more diverse groups. Recent research at the Stanford School of Business suggests that teams holding at least two separate points of view on a particular question do, indeed, make better decisions because the minority pressure forces the majority to think more complexly and consider diverse evidence. Focusing on 40 years of decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court, researchers found that justices in the majority reasoned with even greater complexity when defending the status quo than when upending it; decisions on …
