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Top six rules for dealing with uncertainty
“Toddy-boy, you’re just going to have to deal with the ambiguity!” Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko’s, said that to me after significantly changing our growth targets. I’d just spent weeks working with my team on capital plans, new store locations, staffing plans, etc., for the coming year. I wanted...
Big Data and the boardroom
Businesses today now collect billions of additional pieces of digital information on customers, processes, products, competitors and employees. Very few of these bits and bytes of information are significant on their own. But, if compiled in totality and analyzed with today’s powerful computing pl...
Five tips to overcome “Gratitude Deficit Disorder”
In between the highs and lows, a little recognition can go a long way in keeping a team together when the going gets tough. It’s easy to take a colleague, a boss or an employee for granted and assume they know you “see” the quality of their work, their drive, their productivity, and their dedicati...
Reading for the plane
Here's some reading to take along on your next businss trip: Take Command Lessons in Leadership: How to Be a First Responder in Business by Jake Wood. The founder and CEO of Team Rubicon and an ex-Marine sniper applies lessons in leadership and teamwork from the disaster zone and battlefield to sh...
Band of Brothers…
Perhaps you saw this miniseries, one of the best things I’ve seen on television, depicting real soldiers in WWII. It dawned on me that the most engaged, committed teams I’ve been part of or worked with had much in common with the Band of Brothers soldiers. I’m not delusional. Nothing we do in busi...
Best of CoBiz: Top 10 reasons to focus on three things
I've noticed a growing trend of Top 10 lists on various sites. There are even Top 10 lists dedicated to why Top 10 lists are so popular. And I see why people like these lists - easy to assimilate and plays into our bullet point world. Is 10 the magic number though? Is five seen as too few, and 20...
Wanna B? This book will help you get there
Companies such as outdoor gear manufacturer Patagonia, ice cream producer Ben & Jerry’s and Fort Collins-based brewery New Belgium have all proactively built reputations as businesses built around visions and missions that peacefully coexist with strong business models. Not coincidentally, those t...
Managing uncertainty with confidence
Recently, a friend gave me a gift that included this tantalizing quote from clergyman Robert Schuller: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you would not fail?” Definitely a question to spark the imagination. After rethinking every single aspect of my life, the question took me to leadership,...
Falling out of love with being CEO
I was a CEO once. In my first real company, Feld Technologies, there were two founders – me and Dave Jilk. I was president (we didn’t use the CEO title then, but as the president, I was the “chief executive officer”) and Dave was vice president. As we grew, other people had different titles, but t...
Changes in the boardroom
ecent research conducted by OpenMatters with Deloitte & Touche examined 40 years of data from the Standard & Poor's 500 index and revealed that digital technologies are disrupting existing business models and their underlying sources of value. The research finds that investors assign higher valuat...
Best of CoBiz: Six rules for a happy workplace
I play two main roles in life: corporate consultant to leaders and parent of two teenagers. I am often struck by the similarities between these two "jobs." As I see it, many leaders spend their day trying to "make up" for parenting that didn't happen. And, if you happen to be doing both jobs - you...
Prepare for bends in the road
There is naturally fear in making predictions about the future because you are virtually guaranteed being wrong about at least part of your prediction. Most leaders in businesses are more comfortable waiting for current reality to change and then trying to react to it. Depending upon your industr...
