Author Archive

Listen (to the voice of your customers)

Valcort 35 Keys to Business Growth: #3 Clearly understand your customers’ unmet needs, their frustrations, and what they look for in products and services like yours. Last year, when we talked to the senior leaders of a manufacturing firm with a large footprint in a niche market, we sensed concern,...

What People Believe Matters

Valcort 35 Keys to Growth: #2 Know what customers, distributors, shareholders, vendors and employees believe about your company.  Let’s face it. You act on what you believe to be true. Last week I decided to purchase a watch as a birthday gift for my wife. As I was thinking about...

The Importance of a Vision Statement

#1. Have a motivating and achievable vision statement that drives critical business decisions. In one of the best-known passages from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice asks the Cheshire Cat-- "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a good deal on where...

The Sharp Edges of Strategy and Business

Sorting through some of my father’s tools yesterday, I ran into three old auger bits. Rusty as they are, they are impressive tools, intentionally designed, and carefully made by a metal-worker with one purpose in mind: to help a carpenter make a hole. Running my fingers over a 75-year-old, rusty...

Three Principles of Greatness

Whether you’re beginning a business from scratch, re-creating an existing organization, or looking to take a company from acceptable to extraordinary, there are three core principles that great operations share--core beliefs that impact management style, communications and use of resources. 1. Truth builds trust Knowing what is true is the...

Delivering Value at Every Point of Contact

Can you think of the last time you were amazed by your experience as a customer? If it involved a product, its performance probably exceeded your expectations, time and time again.  If it was a service, the personal contact most likely left you feeling like someone who matters, or amazed...

Trust: The Essential Currency of Commerce

What is the most important asset in business?  This question is something like the old desert island query:  “If you were on a remote desert island and could have one thing, what would it be?:  It is said that the renowned British satirist turned theologian G.K. Chesterton was asked along...

The CEO’s Transformation Roll-out

By Chuck Thomas, president, The Valcort Group Change has come to your company, division or unit. As the CEO, you’ve done all the research, all the strategy and planning, and the executive team is on board. Now, how do you get your broad employee base to change behaviors to better...

Who do you trust?

Reversing the pervasive loss of trust in American life Who do you trust? In the public square, that’s a more troubling question than it should be. There isn’t enough trust to go around and nearly every institution—government, media, business, sport, and even churches and charities--are responsible and suffering the impact....