Do I Need Coaching or Consulting?
What's the difference between coaching and consulting? What should I expect if I'm considering hiring a coach versus engaging a consultant?

Healthy Organizations
In addition to financial and sales perspectives, I believe an organization development viewpoint is essential when building a healthy organization. Paying attention here will help to create the environment for favorable financial and sales performance.

Don't Blame It On The Corporation
We're too quick to honor corporations for being good community citizens or to blame them for the world's problems. They don't really exist except as a legal and tax concepts. So who should we honor for contributions to society or hold accountable when things go wrong?

A New Approach for Growing Employee Capabilities – Behaviorally Anchored Self Assessment (BASA)
Summerhill Associates' BASA tool is an innovative and legally defensible tool for developing employees and can be easily incorporated into a performance management and review process. It's been developed through years of use in manufacturing organizations with measurable success.

For-profits and Non-Profits: Similar or Different?
Just how similar are for-profit and non-profit businesses? Very similar if you consider the following 8 key items.

Change and Expectations - Steps Towards Sustainability
How do you move an organization into a state where changes are sustained? Setting clear expectations is a necessary step.

"Do Your Homework" Applies to Trademarks and Service Marks Too!
Patent Attorney W. Kevin Roloff spells out what to do and what not to do with regard to using trademarks and service marks in your business branding.

Don't Make These Leadership Mistakes!
Leaders guiding organizational change need to pay attention to several critical things to prevent change initiatives from regressing back to where things were before.  It doesn't take much for change efforts to come unglued.  Read about eight critical errors leaders need to avoid.

Net 30 Payables - An Interesting Concept
Businesses have been operating on a Net 30 basis for decades yet some companies are trying to force their suppliers to Net 45 or Net 60 days on paying invoices.  Steve Gilbertson of Electramatic, Inc. talks about the devastating impact to the supply chain and how this approach is contributing to the credit crunch and our recession.

What Do You Mean By "Quality?"
If you can't define quality, you can't deliver it. Here is some background information that should help you become more clear on this subject.

It’s Back-To-School Time: Do Your Homework on Patents!
Patent attorney W. Kevin Roloff gives us an overview of intellectual property law and how the patent process works.

Setting the Bar Isn't Enough - Business Leaders Need to Consider How They Frame Expectations
Business leaders like to talk about "setting the bar" when it comes to performance expectations. But they often forget something they need to do first.

Minnesota Nice Ain't Nice: Challenging the Accepted Wisdom on Communication
Bob Ryan of About Purpose spells out 4 communication errors and their remedies to get around the Minnesota Nice problem of not saying what you mean.

Strategic Planning That Works
"Give me one good reason why I should consider strategic planning for my business." Well how about several? See what one business owner has to say about my strategic planning process.

Secrets Of Successful Selling
If selling were so easy, there wouldn't be any secrets to reveal. But for those of us who have to work at it, I've uncovered a few things that might improve your sales approach and help to close the deal.

Personal Vision - There's Something in it For Me After All
A business should be a vehicle for taking its owner where he or she wants to go. This is difficult if owners don't have a vision of how they want to live their lives. My strategic planning process starts right here.

Is Your Company an Asset or an Heirloom?
Family business issues become even more delicate when the current owners are considering the future ownership of the business. A business that's been in the family for multiple generations compounds the decision and there is usually a strong emotional aspect around legacy to deal with. Families need to come to terms with how they view their company.

Two Roles of the CEO
Believe it or not, CEOs have only two critical jobs - which doesn't sound like much to do but it means EVERYTHING to the success of the organization.

Organizational Performance - Getting Beyond the Financials
Your income statements, P&Ls, and balance sheets don't tell the whole story about how well your organization is doing. There are other aspects to organizational performance to think about that can have a huge impact on financial performance.

Why Your Company Needs a Board of Directors
A Board of Directors is not just for large companies. Savvy small business owners can reap a host of benefits from having their own boards.

Change - Put it in Play
Why is it so hard to make changes and get them to stick? I explore 3 components to the change process that may shed some light.

The Organizational Echo
Does the voice you give to your organization's guiding principles come back to you in behaviors that support them? Consider the echo.....

Covenants for Establishing Team Community
Over the years, many studies have outlined what types of environments technical professionals (used synonymously with the term "knowledge workers") prefer to work in to be at their most effective levels of performance. So the obvious question is how does an organization take advantage of this information to create this environment? After spending my 30-year engineering career in large companies, I would have thought more of them would have done a better job at this than they did. After all, if they hired us to create products for them, why wouldn't they unleash us to do just that? What was important to consider here?

Creative Space Model - A Tool for Teams
In the fifteen-plus years that I have been involved with teams - as a student of the team concept, a team member, a team leader, a m anager, and a consultant - I have learned some important lessons culled from personal experience: team members like working on teams, functional managers don't know if they like teams or not, not everyone makes a good team member, and it's a much more difficult to build and sustain a team over time than many people realize. For teams involved in new product development, these issues can be compounded by the need to work together in a creative environment. To do so effectively requires a heightened level of awareness from team members, team leaders, and the organizations that support them.

Hiring for Fit...to What? Strategic Interviewing and Organizational Culture
Don't overlook organizational culture considerations in your hiring and promotion decisions. Here are some tips to making a great hire and avoiding some huge pitfalls down the road.

Vision - Mission, Synonyms They Are Not!
Operations "Jedi Master" Greg Kvidera of Procedo, Inc. shares his thoughts on the difference between vision and mission statements - a difference that still perplexes many small to medium-size businesses.

Dough See Dough
Our Operations "Jedi Master" Greg Kvidera hits a home run with a down-to-earth article on how to get into the "swing of things" with your banker - especially important when you need to borrow money for your business.

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