You Only Need to Get One Thing Right Management, marketing, and business are prone to clutter. It’s so tempting to jump on the next trend, to embrace the newest tactic. But the truth is, in business, you only need to … Continue reading →

What Improv Can Teach Us About Business There is a rule in the realm of theater called improv, where the performances are made up on the fly. It goes something like this: “say ‘yes’ to everything.” In other words, no … Continue reading →

Processes Matter More than Goals If there’s one ubiquitous think all managers agree on, it’s that you need to set goals in order to get where you want to go. Well, today I’m going to get a bit heretical, because … Continue reading →

Why Incentives Are a Double Edged Sword When business is growing stagnant, competitors are pulling ahead, and the future looks dire, things need to change. And most people immediately respond with incentives: harsh punishments and appealing rewards that will keep … Continue reading →

It’s almost impossible to be an entrepreneur or a marketing professional without knowing something about metrics. We’ve probably quoted Peter Drucker’s famous “what gets measured, gets managed,” more than once on this blog, and that management principle applies to almost … Continue reading →

One question business consultants get asked a lot is how important things like patents are. Well, this deserves the standard disclaimer: we’re not lawyers, and this post is written for a general audience. But for most of you, I’m going … Continue reading →

As entrepreneurs and business professionals, theories and abstraction don’t usually interest us very much. We’re looking for something actionable, something we can use. We don’t want information for its own sake; we want answers. The trouble is, when we place … Continue reading →

Have you heard something like this before: “Marketing’s no longer an art, it’s a science.” I hate that stance, because it implies that science and art are somehow polar opposites. Nothing could be further from the truth. If the phrase … Continue reading →

Frustrated with “gurus” who cherry pick success stories, and executives, who point to their success as evidence that everything they’ve ever done helped them get where they are, the Harvard Business Review recently decided to approach the subject of successful … Continue reading →

Crowdsourcing is the act of putting your consumers to work for you. It sounds like a great deal: recruit your customers, pay them nothing, watch sparks fly, make a profit. And it can work wonders when you know what you’re … Continue reading →