To give your employees real feedback requires observation, preparation and follow up. It starts with you. Coaching gets discussed constantly in business. Yet, most employees lament that they don’t receive coaching at work. Why the disconnect? First, coaching is not the same as mentoring. Coaching requires direct observation. Mentoring is normally based on hearing a [...]
Archive | Home Bussines Ideas RSS feed for this section
How To Make Your Meetings Count
Effective collaboration doesn’t just happen. The key to a high-performance team is brain science. I don’t have a problem with meetings. Teamwork and collaboration are critical to success, and research has determined that the collective intelligence of a group is greater than the intelligence of any member of the group. But I do have a [...]
87,000 Ways To Save American Airlines
A plea to CEO Tom Horton to turn American Airlines employees into believers, proselytizers, and champions–and fix up the airline’s finances in the process. “We will have to make very tough and sometimes unpopular decisions that will impact people’s lives.” —An internal letter to employees from Tom Horton, CEO of AMR Corporation, American Airlines’ parent [...]
The Value of the Designer Who Codes
There’s a new breed of tech experts out there, and they’re poised to take over design and engineering at the most innovative of start-ups. “Well, it’s a start, but basically it stinks,” said Steve Jobs, telling early Apple engineer Chris Espinosa exactly how he felt about the company’s first calculator application. Iteration after iteration, Jobs [...]
New Year’s Advice: Don’t Sell to Jerks
When you sell to people you truly can’t stand, you make yourself less effective and hurt your sales growth. For the past week—the first I’ve had off since February 2007—I’ve been trying to decide how to best start out the new year. I wanted something useful, something that would last long after your new year’s [...]
7 Steps to Incredible Personal Productivity
Practical advice to turn an average workday into an incredibly productive day. Occasionally you need to go the extra mile. Sometimes you need to complete a major project, tackle a task you’ve put off, or just knock out a ton of work in one day. Here’s the best way to turn a normal workday into [...]
Pleasing the Socially Conscious Consumer
A shift in Gen Y customers’ expectations mean businesses need to do more than just make money. Or does it? A few weeks ago when I was speaking to young entrepreneurs who are building businesses around the idea of combining traditionally crafted goods with cutting-edge business tech, several mentioned what first appeared to be a [...]
Payroll Tax Extension? 2 Months Do Nothing for Small Business
The two-month payroll tax break extension perpetuates economic uncertainty for small business owners and creates logistical headaches for bookkeepers. Last week, Congress approved a two-month extension to the Temporary Payroll Tax Cut Continuation Act of 2011. The extension continues the reduction of employees’ Social Security tax withholding rate from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent of [...]
Top 5 Live Chats of 2011
Looking for inspiration? Watch our top five most-watched entrepreneur Live Chats in 2011! Viewed by nearly 100,000 people so far this year, we rank them here in order of popularity. 1. Ryan Blair The serial entrepreneur, CEO of ViSalus Sciences, and author of Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain, talks about how his uncommon past [...]
Celebrate Your Mistakes; You’ll Learn
The best businesspeople don’t know everything. They’re the ones who are brave and truthful enough to admit mistakes–and learn the most from them along the way. How did you learn to walk? By falling over. How did you learn to speak? By coming out with a lot of gibberish first. And if you’ve learned to [...]
