Business

Why success or failure depends on finding chaos in our companies before it finds us. Q: What does your company share with Jurassic Park? A: A make-or-break potential for chaos. In the original Jurassic Park movie, the character played by Jeff Goldblum (Ian Malcolm) immediately identified the enterprise as “an accident waiting to happen.” An expert in chaos theory, he was brought in to answer

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What do we mean by “owner-proofing”? Simply put, we mean building yourself a business that will run nearly as well, or better, without you. In other words, build a “company,” not a “practice.” Here’s an example of an owner who, with our help, solved his owner-proofing problem before it was too late and went on to build the value of the

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What makes Duke’s Coach K a “living sustainable competitive advantage”? How can you apply it to your company?  In January, Duke University’s already legendary basketball coach, Mike Krzyzewski-Coach K-became the first NCAA Division 1 men’s basketball coach to win 1,000 games. In business jargon, Coach K is a living “sustainable competitive advantage.” He’s also coached the US Olympics team to four gold medals, won four NCAA National Championships at Duke,

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We knew where we wanted to go but not how to get there. Our clients taught us a great lesson about business growth that put us on the right path and has kept us there ever since. By Phil Krone, President I took the entrepreneurial plunge 20 years ago in July and launched my own marketing and management consulting firm,

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In April we published a column–“Is ADHD Affecting Your Sales Results?”–about how ADHD might affect some salespeople, their managers, and their productivity. A number of readers told us they were surprised that the prevalence of ADHD in salespeople may be twice that of the general population. Others felt they had just looked into a mirror. A manufacturing CEO–who is also

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Some 25 years ago I gained an insightabout women, sports, and business that continues to unfold even today. At a dinner I was seated next to Phil Purcell, then chairman of Dean Witter, a large financial services firm and a division of Sears. I mentioned that my seven-year-old daughter was the only girl on a co-ed basketball team. What he said

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We’ve all heard the saying, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” and we’ve no doubt used it to inspire our troops or ourselves from time to time. And why not? It’s a tried-and-true power-of-positive-thinking gem. Even better, it’s versatile. It can be said with a smile or a frown. It throws down a dangerous-sounding non-challenge without placing

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Are your customers buying less and less as the economic news gets worse and worse? Notice that we didn’t say the economy is getting worse-just the news. But that’s another story. And it really doesn’t matter because your bread is buttered at the micro-economic level, not the macro. What can you do now to keep your top line on top?

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Our clients are showing us another side of the nation’s tarnished economic coin, and this side is brighter. They’re finding productive ways to make use of this downturn to keep their companies moving up. What does that bright side look like? To us, it looks like opportunity. Opportunity #1: Standing Out from Your Competition. While their competition is circling the wagons,

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Economic slow-downs usually mean we must work harder and smarter to stay busy. If we’re not busy, we need to be busy getting busy and generating revenue now. 1. Get Ahead of the Trends or Just Keep Up. Do you have the kind of business that could “ride the wave” of a trend? Or, can you make a few changes and

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