The first five months of this year have not exactly been a stroll in the park for most people with continued uncertainty about jobs, inflation and household finances.  In a previous post I challenged you to inject the buzz into your business and steal a march on the competition by tasking your senior management to [...]

Not everyone is motivated by money, was the answer given to a business owner at a recent What If Forum in response to the question: “How do I motivate and reward my CEO who was appointed just over a year ago?” When closely questioned by his peers it became clear that this business owner did [...]

“I could smell that things were wrong. We weren’t creating a soulful, romantic experience anymore: We’d lost sight of the experience around the coffee” This was what famous US entrepreneur Howard Schultz in a recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek interview discovered when he returned to being CEO of Starbucks. Motivated and fired up Schultz, who had previously [...]

With 25 per cent of the year having gone swiftly by, have you considered how you will exceed your business growth target for the next quarter? What are you going to do differently? You want to see sales increase and costs come down. So what changes are you going to make to how you behave, [...]

Embarking on the emotional rollercoaster of transferring a family-owned business demands careful planning and brutal honesty in assessing if the next generation is up to the job of running the company.   In my experience as a business strategist and executive coach, less than half of family run enterprises are unable to make the move [...]

It seems that a good proportion of CEOs have an elevated opinion of their own company’s level of creativity. According to a recent survey, when 1200 CEOs were asked to rank their company’s innovation over 52 per cent of them felt they were in the top ten per cent of their industry. Now, I’m not [...]

“I’m doing it for my family, to give them a better life” is the stock answer we all give when asked why we put ourselves through all the pain and heartache of owning and running a business.  And, in my experience as a business strategist and executive coach, some of us proudly produce the business [...]

In my previous post, I wrote that “We become the stories we tell ourselves” As a business strategist and executive coach my question to you is “Are you a Possibilitarian?” Are you someone who sees vast new horizons of possibilities or are you hemmed in by doubts, fears and current worries? People performance and management [...]

In my previous post, I talked about how we can learn a great deal about ourselves and our leadership from the stories we relate about our lives. As a business strategist and executive coach, I ask you to reflect on exactly where you are in the current chapter of your business life. Answer honestly if [...]

This question was posed by the Chairman of an SME company I work with as a business strategist and executive coach and he agreed to pose it to a group of his peers.  His concern is that people are, or will possibly, abuse the system and do not think before they charge things to their [...]