Author Archive

Are your employees your best advocates?

Would you recommend that a friend seek employment at your company? This is one of the questions we include in our organizational survey of employee satisfaction and values, conducted as part of our VALCORT strategic study. It’s an important question that can provide a revealing look at an organization’s health....

American English: one language, many differences

EVERYONE KNOWS that Americans don’t exactly agree on pronunciations. Regional accents are a major part of what makes American English so interesting as a dialect. Joshua Katz, a PhD student in statistics at North Carolina State University, just published a group of awesome visualisations of a linguistic survey that looked at...

Does vision ever take a day off? The importance of share values and vision

Does vision within an organization need to be tempered, does the role of vision ever stop or slow? Does forever need to reach into the future and push the envelope out of the current state? I believe continued, ever-expanding vision is critical if an organization is to create sustainable growth. To understand the...

Speaking the right language? The importance of customer profiling

An important part of great marketing is speaking the right language! [caption id="attachment_4103" align="alignright" width="300"] America tongue language open mouth. Studio shot.[/caption] If you know who you are trying to reach with your sales and marketing messages, the next step is to figure out what language they speak. No,  not...

What are your New Year’s resolutions?

Do you make New Year’s resolutions? It’s a long tradition that doesn't’ seem to be losing steam.  Here are the top-10 New Year's resolutions from a recent survey of 2,000 people conducted for Inc. magazine: Diet or eat healthier (71%) Exercise more (65%) Lose weight (54%) Save more and spend...

Secret Spy? Conducting Competitor Research

It’s not difficult to find the opposite of customer-centricity. I found it while traveling in eastern Europe late last year, where many businesses still—after 50 years of official communism followed by 25 years of capitalism—haven’t discovered the value and competitive advantage of good customer relations. But you don’t have to...

Questions that will help your business grow

Recently, we worked with a respected manufacturing company that was concerned about multiple years of flat growth in a thriving industry. They believed that their products were chosen because they were of the highest quality in the category, but they could not figure out why they weren’t growing. We worked with the...

Lift the Fog: Leadership values as the key to growth

As an employee, customer, investor, or a competitor, what is the most important thing you can learn about a company?  If you said profitability, market share, operating margin, or the direction of their industry segment, you’d be hitting on strong factors impacting the company’s financial health. But I’d suggest that what...

10 Business Decisions that Influenced the Future  

We've found 10 examples from the last 75 years when individuals, companies or groups saw a need and took dramatic action, often creating something historic out of nothing--advancing not only single invention or program, but also the business principles that influenced not only that time, but today and our future. Here they are:...

4 Dimensional Trust in an Age of Change

When you or your company or group seek to operate in a change environment, or if you are going into a time of change, the highest priority will be to create and rely on embedded, earned trust. And in times of change, the last thing you need to experience as an...