Weak start to communications hinders crisis management Last week, Sony’s “Playstation Network” suffered one of the largest breaches of confidential user information in history. With over 75 million users affected, to say that Sony has a crisis management case on its hands would be an understatement. The electronics giant put itself in a bad place …

Supporters of project management templates will try to tell you this is the only way to ensure best practices are embedded in project planning. While templates provide some form of guidelines that ensures information completeness, they have their limitations and drawbacks.

Most organizations have a Board of Directors. Carter McNamara, coordinator for this blog site, writes that some common responsibilities of Boards include: Determine the Organization’s Mission and Purpose Support the Executive and Review her Performance Ensure Effective Organizational Planning Ensure Adequate Resources Determine the Organization’s Services and Programs What if you had a Spiritual Board …

Have you ever made a hiring mistake — selecting the wrong person for the position? Most of us, who are or have been supervisors, have had to deal with the consequences of a poor hire. It can eat up one’s time and energy and weaken an entire team. However, a good hire can take the …

Since being promoted to the new position of manager of operations, I have detected an aloofness from my team. I feel like an outsider. But how to manage former teammates? Congratulations on your promotion. I know that there will be a lot of challenges associated with your new job. One of them is the feelings …

A key problem for many new nonprofits is that most of their founders, that “small number of caring people who want to help,” have the impression that fundraising has to do with “fundraisers” — special events or sales: dinners, circuses, golf tournaments, T-shirts, cookies or candy. That couldn’t be farther from reality. While those activities …

Airline learns from crisis management mistakes Southwest Airlines is no stranger to crisis management, just earlier this month coping with a messy communication situation after a flight was forced to make an emergency landing due to a a ruptured fuselage, so when a landing flight not only slid off of a runway in Chicago, but …

In my organization it was decided we had depended on technology and already available computer training too long. The leadership and management had to admit that there were knowledge gaps in our workforce. People with valuable corporate knowledge were leaving or retiring who we couldn’t replace for budget reasons, but we still needed to get …

As stated in my previous two posts, training sessions can be a dreaded activity by many. Despite research that tells us lecture is not learning, it is still the most used delivery method. And with current updates in technology the lecture is often supported with a deck of PowerPoint slides filled with the words being spoken by the presenter often times while reading directly from the screen or his printed copy. It is not surprising that this is the most common method. It is the easiest to develop and control and it is what learners often expect. This may just be why they dread coming to training.

Even the best laid plans can go awry, and we all have tough times in business. It can be challenging to close major sales, get the growth we want, and our competitors tend to throw up obstacles. Through all this, how do you stay motivated? What works for you may not work for someone else. …