No Steve, Jack or Bill, it’s just The Caterpillar Way

How many companies get Leadership right? Do you always need that charismatic leader that makes us think about them before the company? An excerpt from tomorrow’s podcast with Craig Bouchard, author of the book, The Caterpillar Way: Lessons in Leadership, Growth, and Shareholder Value, is directed at those questions. P.S. If you know my legacy Read More …

Marketing Campaign Project Map

For quite a few years, I have used this outline to organize marketing campaigns, create web pages or so-called squeeze pages and many other marketing efforts. I first ran across this outline in the book, The Marketing Playbook: Five Battle-Tested Plays for Capturing and Keeping the Lead in Any Market by Jahn Zagula and Richard Read More …

Your Organizational Persona? Map it!

Do we focus on the customer too much? Most of us would disagree and say no that we should focus on the customer more. However, recently we have seen a tremendous amount of books written on organizational clarity. One of the reasons is that without understanding our purpose as an organization or as an employee Read More …

Lean Sales & Marketing (Creating your Vision)

I use to think that Vision and Mission Statements was just a consultant/academic type exercise. I did them but I have to honestly admit, it may have been more of an exercise than a real vision. In recent years, working with such a variety of companies, I have shifted my thinking. Without vision, you seldom Read More …

What it takes to Simplify

Irene Etzkorn, my guest on the Business901 podcast, is a worldwide authority on simplicity. As executive director of Simplification, she built the Simplification practice of Siegel+Gale. Her clients include the nation’s top banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies, utilities, and health care providers. Irene and Alan Siegel have recently authored Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity Read More …

Are we making Lean to difficult?

Many of us that drink the Lean Kool-Aid view Lean as the ultimate business methodology and any Lean implementation falling short of a complete transformation is a failure. If an organization chooses a different course than fully buying into a Lean Transformation”, what is the harm? It is about the business being a success, not Read More …