Nicholas Bate

Build A Better Business 59: Follow Through

What happened to those great ideas generated at the quarterly off-site last June? Did the flip-charts get typed up? Did the summaries get circulated? Did the actions get attributed? Did the action holders execute? Did the magic of kaizen start to happen?

No?

Back to Basics: follow-through.

Build A Better Business 58: Don't (Just) Keep Up

Look up from the screen, look out at the world and leap-frog what your competitors are doing.

Build A Better Business 57: Banned E-Mail

Consider banning e-mail between employees from 1800 Friday to 0700 Monday assuming those are their 'rest' days.

Try it as an experiment. It may encourage planning, focus, decisions on what is really important. And a proper break.

Build A Better Business 56: The Conference

'Tis the season of the Autumn/Fall conference. Powerpoint overload, free bars, guest speakers and team games.

Whatever happens ensure every one of your people walks back to their car on the final afternoon-having had a good time-knowing exactly what they need to do differently in the coming months. Achieve that and it's been worth every penny/cent.

Build A Better Business 55: Releasing Talent

Some employees abuse the system. Some employees are unproductive. Some employees hide behind excuses of 'busyness, meetings, e-mail and poor work/life balance'. To attempt to manage them, more command and control practices are introduced. Because such practices cannot really be selective they tend to exhaust and stifle your very best people, those who do enjoy the job, do enjoy dealing with challenging clients and do recognise that business is-well-messy.

Releasing talent isn't just about hiring a 'talent director'. Releasing talent is about ensuring managers understand that leadership is about enabling a person to be the best version of themselves as then they will do great work for you. Even if that means one or two wake up so much that they realise they don't want to work for you anymore.

Build A Better Business 54: Start Times

Start times are not a suggestion. 

Build A Better Business 53: The High Performance Team

It has little to do with having gone white-water rafting together. Nor having a cool mission statement on the wall. But everything to do with having total loyalty to each other.

And that's not an app but a multitude of deep conversations...

Build A Better Business 52: Objectives

Clear objectives for the quarter-rewarded by bonuses/or not-do tend to get individuals to focus on the quarter. But what's getting them to give attention to the longer term, the neglect of which has been the demise of all once robust, thriving and great firms?

Build A Better Business 51: Great Selling

Great selling is building a case so strong that the prospect wants to buy. And wants to buy now. And at the requested full price.

Any deviation from that plan is negotiation which is a different skill.

Sell first, then negotiate.

Bonus 1: Selling Without Tears, free PDF

Bonus 2: How To Sell Brilliantly in Good Times and Bad, amazon: paper and kindle.

Build A Better Business 50

There's small spam. And then there's PowerPoint.