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The CFC: Choosing Your Leadership Development Team

It’s almost spring, and now’s the time to start planning your non-profit’s CFC campaign for the 2012 campaign season. The best-selling author, Jim Collins, who wrote Good to Great, has five key principles for organizational success; and, in his own words, the single most important principle is to “Get the right people on the bus.” …

Life Cycle Financing Options

When you’re looking for financing, it may seem that anything will do. However, depending on the life cycle stage of your venture, some forms of financing are better than others. You want the right kind of capital for the needs of your business at that point in time.

All That You Think, Say and Do

I love the music and lyrics of Faith Rivera. She’s a fabulous singer and messenger. Her performances are energizing, inspiring, and touching. I want to share this video clip that I use in some of my programs to get energized. Listen to the music and let it fill you with positive energy. See which lines …

Poorest Customer Service in the Land Where it Really Counts

No, it’s not a Fairy Tale. It’s more like a rave about bad customer service, why they don’t give good customer service, and naturally, why we should, which gets us to the training part of this. I guess I should feel lucky to not live in a third-world county, but I think I’d get a …

How to start looking forward? – a dilemma

James is a recently-appointed director on the board of a family business. He is the nephew of the founder and has worked in the business for several years since completing his MBA. He is concerned because the board meetings are all taken up with historical reports and endless discussions of ‘who did what’ and how …

What are your organization’s “Broken Windows”?

Political scientist James Q. Wilson recently passed away at the age of 80. Wilson and co-author George L. Kelling argued in a landmark 1982 article in The Atlantic that communities must address minor crimes and their effects, such as broken windows, to prevent larger problems from developing. They argued the crime of vandalism wasn’t as …

Will Machines Always Make Life Easier?

There was a time when we stopped looking at machines as making our lives’ easier and started looking at the jobs they were replacing–and, indeed, they began replacing jobs. Some people were much in hate with machines then–except the owners and inventors. My apologies to those of you who develop training apps and sell the …

Why Complaints Are Gifts

Let’s face it; it’s no fun when someone complains. Some people, the saying goes, just like to complain. Best to give them what they want and send them away, right? Not really. Complaints can provide such valuable market feedback that you’ll want to include strategies in your business plan for dealing with them. Most of …