Tag: planning

Leadership Thought #335 – Navigating A Seasonal Business

Business is hard enough with encumbering it with seasonality issues. I’ve seen many talented and hard working small business owners struggle under the weight of non-seasonal business volume. It’s hard to staff properly, keep good people and manage your cash properly. If you’re not careful it can begin to feel like a “feast or famine” situation which over the years can start to wear you down. Of course there are many people who manage to navigate the “ups and downs” properly, but they are usually pretty disciplined about their business leadership actions. If you are in a seasonal business environment, I encourage you to consider the following:

Leadership Thought #271 – The Importance of Strategic Thinking and Planning

What strikes me the most is how many organizations view planning as an event to get through rather than the impetus for an ongoing strategic dialogue that is critical to long term success. When it comes to planning, you are never done, just sharpening your focus and increasing your performance capability as you go along.

Leadership Thought #258 – Are You Prepared For The Unexpected?

70 years ago today our country was attacked at Pearl Harbor and the world was never the same. America, which hadn’t been subject to another country attacking our territory since The War of 1812, had to deal the terrible wave of war that would end up sweeping the globe and literally becoming a world war. While our political and military leaders had tried to prepare for this inevitability, we were still caught off guard and it took us about 2 years to get our footing and begin to turn the battle to our favor. We had to significantly scale up our industrial military industrial capacity and recruit millions of soldiers to sign up and join the fight which was taking places in multiple locations throughout the world. If you think about what was accomplished logistically in a relatively short period of time, it is quite impressive. Thank goodness we were up to the challenge.

Daily Leadership Thought #80 – When It Comes to Goals, Less Is More

The most successful people I know don’t create long lists of goals they want to accomplish. As the saying goes, “if everything is important, than nothing really is.” Instead, they focus on a handful of objectives that will clearly advance the end results they are trying achieve in their work and personal life.