CEOs, have you ever asked yourself, "Is improvement really necessary?"
You’ve become the leader, after all, and it seems only natural that you’ve achieved all you need to remain successful in your job.
This attitude is misguided and self-defeating, says Joel Trammell, a contributor to Forbes. “Continuous improvement is vital to performing well as a CEO,” he writes. “The best ones make time for it, because they see it as an investment in themselves and their company that will pay off in real dollars down the line.”
Trammel offers these tips for CEOs, to help with continuous performance improvement. (more…)
CEOs, have you ever asked yourself, "Is improvement really necessary?"
You’ve become the leader, after all, and it seems only natural that you’ve achieved all you need to remain successful in your job.
This attitude is misguided and self-defeating, says Joel Trammell, a contributor to Forbes. “Continuous improvement is vital to performing well as a CEO,” he writes. “The best ones make time for it, because they see it as an investment in themselves and their company that will pay off in real dollars down the line.”
Trammel offers the following tips for CEOs, to help with continuous performance improvement. (more…)
Every business depends on growth to succeed. That's why CEOs and business owners focus so much of their daily efforts on how best to grow their enterprise. But there’s also risk in too much growth—that's why managing business growth is essential.
Whether you define growth as making key investments, identifying and penetrating your core customer base, or scaling operations to see a profit, “growth is also about slowing down,” say Karl Stark and Bill Stewart, contributors to Inc. If your business experiences too much growth or it grows by acquiring the wrong type of customers, the result can be failure—just as surely as if there was no growth at all. Managing business growth takes some finesse.
Stark and Stewart are managing directors and co-founders of Avondale Strategic Partners, a Chicago-based advisory firm that focuses on growing companies. When strategizing about managing business growth for your company, they suggest keeping a few key factors in mind. (more…)
Companies that excel at innovation share certain common characteristics.
They’re creative, leaders in their markets and have a reputation for being “cutting-edge.”
It’s not surprising most businesses want to join this elite circle.
To do so, says Hal Gregersen and Jeff Dyer, PhDs at the University of California, Irvine, and UCLA respectively, innovation must be “consciously cultivated at the leadership level, and then through the organization.”
As Dyer and Gregersen note in an article for Innovation Management, “If company leaders don’t embrace innovative thinking and skills firsthand, the rest of the organization doesn’t stand a chance.”
According to the authors (co-creators of Innovator’s Accelerator), innovation takes place at three levels, all of which “are important to sustain and grow a business.” These levels include:
(more…)
