What makes the difference between sporadic success and sustainable, continuous success? Kaizen. Kaizen is a Japanese term for improvement. It specifically refers to continuous, incremental improvement through the reduction of waste and small improvements to efficiency. Kaizen is, in some ways, the opposite of innovation: improvement and focus on what you have rather than trying…
Are you familiar with the Golden Rolodex? It’s a sales expression as well as a human resources expression. The Golden Rolodex is your personal database, your personal set of connections and relationships that you’ve built over your career. When companies are looking to hire top talent in sales and executive functions, very often the Golden…
How many times have you heard something like this? Direct mail is dead. Outbound marketing is dead. Email is dead. Podcasting is dead. MySpace is dead. If someone is shouting loudly that something is dead, that’s a good indicator to take a look at it. The ploy of claiming something is dead is typically shouted…
The path to becoming exceptional is relatively simple to get started on. In a world that has generally accepted mediocrity, if not outright failure, finding a few parts of your business to improve that will push you past your competitors is simple. It starts with listening to yourself. Consider all of the complaints people have…
Grab the beverage of your choice, a quiet place to contemplate, the writing instrument of your choice (paper, pen, iPad, whatever), and ask yourself this very serious question. So serious it’s a deadly serious question, because the wrong answer might literally kill you. What price will you pay for success? What are you willing to…
On becoming a technomarketer and Chief Marketing Technologist Mitch Joel wrote my biography for the last seven years the other day when he described the Chief Marketing Technologist, a person in a company who is both in marketing and IT. That’s what I’ve been doing for years and years, bridging the gap between marketing and…
Take a ball of pizza dough. Now pull as hard and as fast as you can on all the edges. What do you get? The world’s largest, least satisfying bagel, a tiny thin ring of dough. Start over. Take your ball of dough and press down on it really hard, right in the middle. What…
The old joke about quality goes something like this: FAST CHEAP GOOD Choose any two. You can have good and fast, but it won’t be cheap. You can have cheap and fast, but it won’t be good. You can have cheap and good, but it won’t be fast. Want to do a back of the…
You might be doing it wrong… … if you enjoyed my talk about awakening your superhero with the power of social media and then went back to the office and enforced rules about not using social networks at work. … if you read the latest book from your favorite business author, demanded everyone read it,…
