Are you a member of any professional organizations? If youre not, you should be. Joining a professional organization is a smart career move. Find out why below. Professional organizations exist for just about every single employment niche. You can join a professional organization for CEOs,finance,insurance,PA,accounting, nursing, marketing,insurance, sales,project managers,construction,real estate,banking,education, forestry, sports, engineering, medicine, photography,arts,CSR, […]
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Author: makena Mugane
The three elements of full employment
You will never be out of work if you can demonstrably offer one of the following: Sales Additive effort Initiation Sales speaks for itself. If you can sell enough to cover what you cost and then some, there will always be someone waiting to hire you. Additive effort is distinguished from bureaucracy or feel-good showing […]
Employer Insights; The Easiest Way To Bo...
How do you measure the success of your company? One of the most important goals of any business is to be financially healthy. There are countless ways to boost your bottom line, but often the best way is to focus on your team. Its easy to make a business look good on paper, but if […]
The difference between hiring and recrui...
Bob wonders if there’s a difference. I’m pretty sure there is. Hiring is what you do when you let the world know that you’re accepting applications from people looking for a job. Recruiting is the act of finding the very best person for a job and persuading them to stop doing what they’re doing and […]
Who is really the head of marketing ?
The head of marketing. Its easy to be confused about this job, because its not one job, its at least three. This is why its a difficult job to fill, and why turnover is so highwere not allocating resources or setting expectations in a way that matches the work to be done. Marketing strategy: […]
Getting better at bucket management
If you throw a bucket of water on a small campfire, youll succeed in putting it out. Pour a bucketful of sake into one of those little glasses and youll waste most of it and ruin the table setting. And try to use a bucket to refill a dried-out lake and not much will […]
How long is forever?
And how soon is never? Most organizations are fundamentally incapable of planning ten years out. When a company promises to be carbon neutral by 2030, theyre actually saying that they may never be. Thats because almost all the pressures on them are short-term pressures. And it doesnt help that few people expect to be in […]
The chief hype officer…Really?
The chief marketing officer at a big company has an impossible job. The typical duration of a CMO is 18 months because once the CEO realizes that hype for money cant solve their problems, they get restless. The problem lies in what people think marketing is. Marketing isnt paying for ads, changing the logo or […]
Efficient or productive?
When time gets short (for new parents or startup founders, for example) we naturally focus on getting efficient. We can remove extraneous details and distractions and magically get much faster at getting tasks done. But being efficient is not the same as being productive. Productive is the skill of getting the right things done, so […]
The posture of a communicator
If you buy my product but dont read the instructions, thats not your fault, its mine. If you read a blog post and misinterpret what I said, thats my choice, not your error. If you attend my presentation and youre bored, thats my failure. If you are a student in my class and you dont […]
Projects vs tasks
Your job might be a series of tasks. Tasks are work where money is traded for time and effort. You put in a fixed amount of time, expending effort along the way, and you get paid. In the end, tasks are completed and its up to the boss to weave those tasks together into something […]
The travel agents problem
Not just travel agents, but all agents. Information scarcity is disappearing. Forty years ago, passengers didnt know which airline flew where and when. And forty years ago, airlines had no easy way to find out who wanted to fly somewhere. Today, of course, theres no shortage of information or ability to connect. So paying 10% […]
This one simple trick makes everything f...
Here it is, tested, effective and worthwhile: Stop chasing shortcuts. Personal finance, weight loss, marketing, careers, beating traffic, relationships, education, everything that matters to someone often comes with heavily promoted shortcuts as an alternative. Fast, risk-free, effortless secrets that magically work, often at someone elses expense. But if the shortcuts worked as promised, they wouldnt […]
7 Ways To Captivate A Corporate Audience...
We’re all presenting virtually all the time. Interviewing for a new job? That’s a presentation, and you’re the brand. Giving a PowerPoint demonstration to your supervisor or board? That’s a presentation, quite possibly one that could catapult your career or set you back a few notches. Don’t let those opportunities go by without maximizing […]
People dont change
(Unless they want to) Humans are unique in their ability to willingly change. We can change our attitude, our appearance and our skillset. But only when we want to. The hard part, then, isnt the changing it. Its the wanting it.
Caring is free…
In the short run, of course, not caring can save you some money. Don’t bother making the facilities quite so clean. Save time and hassle and let the display get a little messy. Don’t worry so much about one particular customer, because you’re busy and hiring more people takes time and money. But in the […]
Getting the word out…
For some, this is the holy grail of marketing. If only more people knew what you know. If only they were aware of what you have to offer, of the work you can share. Perhaps you can get more people to click on your video, read your tweet or see your Instagram. Alas, awareness is […]
Why even bother to think about strategy?
Theres confusion between tactics and strategy. Its easy to get tied up in semantic knots as you work to figure out the distinction. Its worth it, though, because strategy can save you when tactics fail. If a tactic fails, you should consider abandoning it. But that doesnt mean that theres something wrong with your strategy. […]
But are you doing your work?
Here is a hint: your work might not be what you think it is. A doctor might think her job is to cure diseases. But in fact, thats not what gets and keeps patients. The cure is a goal, and its important, but its not sufficient. The technical tasks are important, but the work involves […]
Two kinds of practice
The first is quite common. Learn to play the notes as written. Move asymptotically toward perfection. Practice your technique and your process to get yourself ever more skilled at doing it (whatever ‘it’ is) to spec. This is the practice of grand slalom, of arithmetic, of learning your lines or c++. The other kind of […]
How to have your Better instincts….
“Go with your gut,” is occasionally good advice. More often, though, it’s an invitation to indulge in your fear or to avoid the hard work of understanding the nuance around us. Better advice is, “invest in making your gut smarter.” The world is a lot more complex than our gut is likely to comprehend, at […]
Four ways to improve customer service…
Delegate it to your customers. Let them give feedback, good and bad, early and often. Delegate it to your managers. Build in close monitoring, training and feedback. Have them walk the floor, co-creating with their teams. Use technology. Monitor digital footprints, sales per square foot, visible customer actions. Create a culture where peers inspire peers, […]
A professional stumbler….
Leo’s working hard to do something he’s never done before. He’s just turned one, and he doesn’t know how to walk (yet). There are no really useful books or videos on how to walk. It’s something he has to figure out on his own. But instead of waiting on the couch until the day he’s […]
Top 30 Open-ended Questions for Business...
Open-ended questions are incredibly valuable to the sales process (as long as you listen). They help you gather information, qualify sales opportunities, and establish rapport, trust, and credibility. As a sales professional, its very important to have a repertoire of powerful open-ended questions questions that are answered by more than a simple yes or […]
Is ignorance the problem…?
It’s nice to think that the reason that people don’t do what you need them to do, or conform to your standards, or make good choices is simply that they don’t know enough. After all, if that’s the case, all you’ll need to do is inform them, loudly and clearly. So, that employee who shows […]
Cost reduce or value increase…?
Organizations that want to increase their metrics either invest in: Creating more value for their customers, or Doing just enough to keep going, but for less effort and money. During their first decade, the core group at Amazon regularly amazed customers by investing in work that created more value. When you do that, people talk, […]
Culture defeats strategy, every time.
It turns out that what actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes and perceptions of the people who do the work. And yet Organizations spend a ton of time measuring the vocational skills, because they can. Because theres a hundred years of history. And mostly, because its safe. Its not […]
How to touch your imagined Future
Researchers have shown that thinking about how the future events will occur actually lays the foundation for such events to occur. But your thinking about the future has to be concrete. In one study, about the effect of thinking about the future, one group of students was asked to imagine the happiness of doing well […]
One way to get a raise…
…is to get promoted. And the best way to get promoted is to learn something new and get good at it. Take a course. Learn to sell. Public speaking. Statistics. Become the person that your organization wants in a bigger role. You can accelerate that process with deliberate learning and practice. Smart companies will pay […]
Skills vs. talents..where is the differe...
If you can learn it, it’s a skill. If it’s important, but innate, it’s a talent. The thing is, almost everything that matters is a skill. If even one person is able to learn it, if even one person is able to use effort and training to get good at something, it’s a skill. It’s […]
Executive Presence: Got It?
I attended a senior financial womens conference recently and heard two very prominent leaders in the industry speak. Interestingly, though both very successful, one seemed to exude much more of that magical quality called executive presence than the other. What was the difference? Its the Little Things The less impressive speaker peppered her comments with […]
What have we become? (And what are we be...
Every day, we change. We move (slowly) toward the person we’ll end up being. Not just us, but our organizations. Our political systems. Our culture. Are you more generous than the you of five or ten years ago? More confident? More willing to explore? Have you become more brittle? Selfish? Afraid? Grumpy and bitter isn’t […]
Don’t give up (you’re on the right track
Wrestling with a puzzle, a project or a problem, the likeliest reason to give up is the belief that it can’t be done. What’s the point of persevering if it’s actually impossible to succeed? “It can’t be done,” we say, throwing up our hands. Not “I can’t do it,” or “It’s not worth my time,” […]
Urgency and accountability are two sides...
As organizations and individuals succeed, it gets more difficult to innovate. There are issues of coordination, sure, but mostly it’s about fear. The fear of failing is greater, because it seems as though you’ve got more to lose. So urgency disappears first. Why ship it today if you can ship it next week instead? […]
Learning from the State Department…
Ambassadors do two things that are really difficult for most people within organizations: 1. They listen and send the notes up the chain. They’re at the front line, and they listen to what’s happening and figure out how to get the right people back home to hear what’s being said. 2. They apologize. Not for […]
May be this Year….
Maybe this year… Your knowledge will reach critical mass.. Your boss will give you the go ahead.. Your family situation will be stable.. The competition will stop innovating.. The traffic jam will cease.. There won’t be any computer viruses to deal with, and Then… You can act, you can launch your project, you can […]