One of the common challenges in business planning is that one often has a better handle on predicting expenses than revenues. It doesn’t mean you’re 100% sure about what your costs are going to be, but for many folks, when they start looking at sales, it’s a crap shoot. As a result, many business plans …

Also known as Autonomous Business Teams, an SBU in its simplest form, is a group ranging between 5 and 20 people, all working as a team to make improvements to the way they work, and within their circle of influence. For this reason SBU’s almost always share common business goals.

The historian Alfred Chandler of Harvard Business School wrote a seminal book published in 1977 on the history of strategic decision making at the highest levels of Corporate America , including DuPont, General Motors, Standard Oil and Sears Roebuck. The book was called The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. In this work …

In today’s workplace, “Managing Up” is essential if you want to avoid cutbacks or be considered for advancement. The term “Managing Up” refers to the process of intentionally working with your manager to obtain the best possible results for you, your manager and your organization. As I work with my coaching clients we strategize ways …

Are you responsible for leading your team to create and deliver presentations together? Whether it is a pitch for new business or a project report, it can be a challenge to develop presentations that are cohesive, smooth and compelling. Before you develop your next team presentation, check out these reminders that may help you create …

How will you communicate in a crisis? At around 7 a.m. Friday, Bank of America Corp. experienced a partial outage of its online banking service. The Charlotte, N.C., bank used Twitter to get the word out, but it did not announce the outage on its home page. Impacted consumers simply got an error message. “It …

The most important word in your performance management strategy may be one that typically does not come to mind. Let’s consider a couple of the ways in which we encourage, teach and train our leaders to improve the performance of their teams.

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From time to time in my business life, someone will ask, or sometimes say that project management is ‘common sense’, meaning it is just common sense. Often they are making a statement along the lines of ‘what’s all the fuss about this PM stuff, it’s all just common sense isn’t it’? Well, my question is, …

Consulting books often suggest a sequence of steps or phases that a consulting project goes through. The nature of the sequence depends on the perspectives of the authors of the books. The initial phase has been referred to by a variety of names, for example, Start-Up and/or Entry. (Some books even mention these two terms …