I spend a lot of time doing research on the web, both specifically to find new ideas and information for my clients and generally to improve by knowledge on all things related to small business. Many of the articles I find interesting are bookmarked on Diigo, and the most interesting of those are also added to a list that can be found here. The articles I’ve most recently added to that list are shown below.
[find more articles here...]
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"Most of the time, particulary in b2b and luxury sales, the competition is nothing.
"I will buy this treat or I will buy nothing, because I don't really need anything."
"I will buy your consulting services, or I'll continue doing what I'm doing now on that front, which is nothing.""
Tags:
seth
marketing
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"I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower."
Tags:
creativity
ideas
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"What's the secret to being a great boss? What are the best ways to motivate staff? How do you turn your business into an ideas factory? In the old days, it was all about providing employees with perks and rewarding the most talented with generous pay packets. Companies would delegate and empower but everyone knew the boss was in charge.
But the world has changed. With the recovery, more employees will be moving on and companies will need to work out ways of keeping them without breaking the bank. With the skills shortage, talent is hard to find. Companies are emerging from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and are looking for talent to drive new opportunities while keeping costs down."
Tags:
culture
leadership
creativity
staffing
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"The thing about habits is that for good and bad they require no thinking. An established habit, whether getting ready for work in the morning or having a whiskey after, is a pattern of behavior we’ve adopted—we stick to it regardless of whether it made sense when we initially adopted it, and whether it makes sense to continue with it years later. From a human irrationality perspective this means that something we do “just once” can wind up becoming a habit and part of our activities for a longer time than we envisioned.
To get some insight into this process, consider the following experiment:"
Tags:
psychology
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"You may think it's safe to assume your rising stars are also highly excited and committed to your company, but Jason Martin and Conrad Schmidt's research suggests otherwise. Over the past six years, they studied over 20,000 "emerging stars" at more than 100 organizations worldwide. Considering the statistics that came out of the study, you may want to rethink any assumptions you have regarding your high potentials:"
Tags:
management
staffing
culture
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"Leaders of good companies aspire to create workplace heavens. Leaders of workplace hells face more daunting challenges, and many will be lucky to achieve purgatory. But how do you reform a bad culture?"
Tags:
staffing
culture
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"The business world is obsessed with "talent" -- hiring it, retaining it, rewarding it. We're urged to "get the right people on the bus." (And, really, what better symbol of the high-performing enterprise than a bus?) The metaphor implies that good workers are portable units of competence. They can bring their talent to your bus or your competitor's bus, but ultimately, it's their prize to bestow.
What if talent is more like an orchid, thriving in certain environments and dying in others? It's an interesting question, full of nature-versus-nurture overtones; we could debate it endlessly. But Boris Groysberg, a professor at Harvard Business School, has spoiled the debate with an unsporting move. He's gathered some data. And what he discovered forces us to rethink the argument."
Tags:
management
staffing
leadership
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"Believe it or not, the mere thought of you can make your employees do a lousy job.
In fact, if your employees consider you a controlling person, even an unconscious thought of you can have a negative effect on their performance."
Tags:
management
psychology
staffing
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"Why do some businesses achieve profound success, while other similar businesses seem to struggle forever? Even though many businesses have great products and quality services, they never seem to really get beyond mere survival level.
Here are five critical mistakes that will kill your chances of attaining above-average success. If you make any of them, your business will achieve average performance at best, and likely create a trap where you end up working long hours for mere survival, or even eventual failure and bankruptcy. Read on and check to see how many you make."
Tags:
strategy
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"Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?" His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers -- and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling. "
Tags:
leadership
strategy
marketing
inspiration
[find more articles here...]