Posts Tag: Valcort

Why selling your products is a bad idea

Valcort 35 Keys to Business Growth:  #4  Have a clear understanding of how each of your products and services relate to the other and to the company as a whole.” I watched as my 10 year-old son dug around in a bin of hundreds of small and odd shaped little...

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...

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....

“Your young men shall see visions”: Importance of a nonprofit vision

As an organizational leader, do you have a vision? Is your organization focused on a clear and broadly understood vision of your corporate purpose and future? “If there is no vision, ” a 1599 version of Proverbs 29:18 reads, “the people decay.”  Without a vision, missions can stagnate or waste...

Trust Me

The tough work of building organizational trust. Trust is a provisional grant that if not supported by action will be removed. It’s a slippery word because of frequent violations! Trust took a hit with the Joe Isuzu farcical television commercials of the 1980s, and Ronald Reagan redefined trust as he...

7 Disciplines of Highly Successful Charities

How to build the trust that fuels program growth By Jim Jewell  In the last year, some two thirds of Americans responded to appeals from charities for support of projects to meet human needs, create new initiatives, advance faith, and reverse wrongs. Nonprofit organizations received $298 billion in donations and...