Management
Effective Meetings by Phone – Part 1, How to Plan a Teleconference
Teleconferences can be a boon or a bust. On the positive side, they allow people at different locations to attend meetings without having to travel. On the negative side, they can degenerate into frustrating struggles with uncontrolled babble. This occurs because people lack visual contact, which hinders effective communication and provides opportunities to misbehave.
Here's [...]
Think Twice Before Selling ROI
When we're selling to business people, our value proposition has to show a good return. Solid, credible Return On Investment (ROI) calculations are supposed to prove this for us. But if we don't think twice, calculating ROI can sabotage our sale.
Lots has been written about various ROI methods — return on assets, net present [...]
Problem-Solving Success Tip: Test Your Assumptions About Everything
Test your assumptions about everything.
Assumptions have a way of creeping into all parts of a problem-solving project. They're often wrong, which can lead to a lot of wasted effort and even cause a problem-solving project to fail entirely. It's very easy to take a strongly stated assertion as true, especially if it's the boss [...]
Problem-Solving Success Tip: Measure
Measure.
The first key question to answer in starting a problem-solving project is, "How will you know when the problem is solved?" Answer this question in measurable terms before you start trying to solve the problem. As you begin defining your problem, these success metrics help set clear expectations about what will be different when [...]
Innovation Management – Diversity Can Make All The Difference
Companies are welcoming a diverse range of employees (The Sunday Times, April 10 2005). Doh!
It is incredible that this concept is getting coverage in 2005. I mean, how many new ideas, novel ideas and divergent thinking is going to come from an all male, white board!
Employees tell us that when you bring together a [...]
Innovation Management – IBM Opens Lid On Its Treasure Chest
IBM, which registered 3248 patents last year, has decided that sharing technology can sometimes be more profitable than jealously guarding its property rights on patents, copyrights and trade secrets (Herald Tribune, April 11 2005).
International Business Machines have come to the above conclusion 205 years after the invention of electric light – thus clearly illustrating [...]
CRM …The Emperors New Clothes
The story of the emperor's new clothes is a fairy tale about men who fooled the emperor into believing that they had made him a beautiful suit of clothes. In fact they had not made anything. The emperor went out in public wearing nothing but his underwear because he didn't want to appear stupid [...]
Making Your Workers Your Partners
There is an inherent conflict between owners and managers of companies. The former want, for instance, to minimize costs – the latter to draw huge salaries as long as they are in power (who knows what will transpire tomorrow). For companies traded in the stock exchanges, the former wish to maximize the value of [...]
Unravelling the Data Mining Mystery – The Key to Dramatically Higher Profits
Data mining is the art of extracting nuggets of gold from a set of seeminngly meaningless and random data. For the web, this data can be in the form of your server hit log, a database of visitors to your website or customers that have actually purchased from your web site at one time [...]
10 Fool Proof Ways To Intensify Your Profits
1. Create benefit intensifiers for your list of ad copy benefits. Example, The Benefit: "Save More Time", The Benefit's Intensifier: "Never Seen Before".
2. Use a little humor in your ad copy. It could be the little extra motive you need to close a sale. People are usually persuaded easier if they're in a good [...]
