Early in my management career, I worked at a company where the mantra was, “Everyone needs to be personally productive.” That meant that no matter your location or position in the organizational structure, you were responsible for regularly producing something of concrete value—no one just “managed.” This was at a newspaper company, so being “personally […]
Years ago, I took over command of a company that was in rocky shape. And on my first day in this new role, I found something interesting in the top drawer of my new desk: reports. Three detailed, extensive reports from experts who had been contracted to assess areas of improvement for the business. My […]
Recently, I was working with a GM of one of my owned companies, and we were conducting a routine review of our results against our first quarter plan. I’ve been doing these types of reviews for years, and I know that there’s often a lot of dead weight in these financial reports. For instance, on […]
When I was taking the first big step in my media career, I found myself in the enviable position of leading a newspaper group as we were coming out of a recession. The local factories needed people desperately, and those help wanted ads made us so much money that we started aggressively going out and […]
Sales can get a bad rap, but there are fundamental elements of selling that can be useful at any level in an organization. In fact, I’d argue that many of the core tenets of sales are really just good management skills. And the higher up the corporate ladder you are, the more important sales skills […]
If you’re like me, the first few days of the new year start with a lot of powering through food comas, picking up project threads from December, and thinking, “How am I going to make an impact this year?” And then you start reading the advice blogs. And what you find often aren’t the game-changing […]
Win or lose, black or white, on or off: Whatever the metric, a lot of management advice is wrapped up in binary thinking. We’ve all read the advice books and viral LinkedIn posts about the secret to winning, how to beat the competition, and other buzzy phrases that tell us that if we’re not winning, […]
A million years ago, I worked my first W-2 job at my local McDonald’s. And sure, it wasn’t my most glamorous role, but I did learn a lot in my time flipping burgers that I still think about today. At the time, the “cool” job was getting to work the grill. That’s probably counterintuitive—the main […]
If you’ve made it this far in the pandemic, the good news is that business is probably solid, at least in comparison to last year. Getting here took a lot of creativity: remixing products, adapting to digital tools, constantly updating for market trends, etc. And I wish I could say that as a reward for […]
I recently read Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller, and it has some interesting insights into how you should bring a product to market. Specifically, it encourages professionals to put themselves in the shoes of the customer and ask one question of whatever they’re selling: “What do I get out of this?” I think in […]
