Header Right

Contact Us

Business Advancement

Igniting Momentum for Game-Changing Results

Blog

How Buzzwords and Jargon Can Actually Be Valuable

Call them “corporate speak”, “buzzwords”, “jargon”, or something else. The conventional wisdom is that we should banish this language from our vocabulary in favor of speaking more plainly. But now we just saw an article in the Harvard Business Review that challenges this belief: Why Business Jargon Isn’t Bad.  

As a matter of fact, for years we’ve been saying that there are legitimate reasons why every company culture reinforces all kinds of acronyms, buzzwords, and jargon.  We came up with three theories for this: Read More

Why Connection is a Strategic Advantage in 2019

Happy New Year! I (Pam) started out the year by returning to The Small Business Advocate Radio Show® with host Jim Blasingame to speak about the power of connections.

Find out why the more we depend upon digital technology for processing information, the more we need the wisdom and art of nuance that comes from connecting personally with each other. Look for this to become a recurring theme during the year.

To listen to our conversation in three segments, click on the “Listen Now” buttons for each segment below.
Read More

Juggling Life At The Holidays?

Jen Slaw

For many CEOs and C-Suite executives, holidays can be particularly stressful. Many people tell us that although they may be on vacation at some point during this time, they never feel like they can completely go offline and relax.

Yes, you know that it’s important to shut off devices and tune out so you can restore your mental and spiritual reserves. But there are always competing demands for your time and attention. You don’t want to miss out on opportunities, but burning out is not a good option either.

So how do you balance everything and truly refresh over the holidays? One way that we’ve found to juggle all the “balls” of our lives, including downtime, is to… Read More

In Memory of Judith E. Glaser, A Game-Changer in Leadership

judith-e-glaser

We are sad to share news of the recent passing of our friend and colleague, Judith E. Glaser, Founder and CEO of Benchmark Communications, Inc. and Chairman of The CreatingWE® Institute. She was widely acknowledged as one of the most pioneering and innovative change agents, consultants and executive coaches in the consulting and coaching industry.

Judith was the world’s leading authority on Conversational Intelligence® (C-IQ). Her transformational approaches use neuroscience and anthropology to enable leaders to raise their Conversational Intelligence and build agile and higher performing individuals and teams. She was the author of 7 best-selling business books, including her most recent best-seller, Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust and Get Extraordinary Results.

Over the years, Scott and I have been powerfully impacted by Judith’s research and framework for Conversational Intelligence®, which makes complex scientific concepts simple to understand and apply. As described on her website, “Conversational Intelligence is a framework for knowing which kind of conversations trigger the lower, more primitive brain and which conversations activate higher-level intelligences such as trust, integrity, empathy, and good judgment.”

Judith definitely lived into her philosophy. We enjoyed our conversations with her so much that she held the honor of being our most frequent guest on Growth Igniters® Radio over the past three+ years. She was willing to discuss anything that would be helpful to us and our top executive listeners, no matter what was happening in her own life. In fact, she was always so bright and engaged in our conversations that during one of our recording sessions Read More

Overcome obstacles through the power of improvisation

photo credit: D. Scott Harper

While there are many things we can’t predict about innovation and growth, we can confidently predict that we all will encounter obstacles of various sizes at some point along the journey.

Sometimes obstacles appear in the form of everyday problems such as misunderstandings. Other times, obstacles show up as life-changing events such as disasters. However, no matter the challenge, one thing that can help us all find our way to new solutions is using the power of improvisation.

While many people think of improvisation as it relates to comedy sketches, we’ve found that there are many other valuable uses for this type of communication.  Read More

How Can You Find The Best C-Suite Talent in a Tight Labor Market?

Perhaps you’re considering hiring an executive search firm to find the best C-suite executives to take your company to the next level of growth. Keep in mind that when the stakes are high and the labor market is tight, mid-market companies can benefit from retained search just as much as large companies.

So how do you decide which firm to partner with on your search for C-Suite talent? It’s important to separate the myths from reality… Read More

How You Can Increase Top Leadership Diversity

In a bold move, on September 30, 2018, the California legislature enacted legislation that mandates Boards of any company based in the state to include a minimum of at least 1 woman. (see Wall Street Journal – “California Becomes First State to Mandate Female Board Directors“)

While it’s difficult to predict the success of this legislation, we can confidently predict that your leadership team’s authentic commitment to increasing diversity will always create a more powerful outcome than simply complying with a law. Given this, how can you find the best candidates for increasing the diversity of your top leadership? Read More

How You Can Increase the Impact of Your Corporate Philanthropy

As you and leadership team consider your philanthropic outreach for 2019, you may be re-evaluating which non-profit causes to support.

While doing good in the world is the obvious benefit of corporate philanthropy, keep in mind that there are also game-changing ways to increase both the top and bottom line impact of your investment. It all depends upon how you do it.

On a previous episode of Growth Igniters® Radio, we discussed this issue with our guest Karen Eber Davis, the leading authority on nonprofit revenue and author of the eBook Can Philanthropy Actually Help Your Bottom Line. Here are some questions she advised leadership teams to consider:

  1. Are we taking a strategic approach to designing our philanthropic outreach? Are the causes you support connected in some meaningful way to what your company does or stands for? An example is an engineering company that donates to technical training programs as their local community college. The community gains by having support for students that need it, and the company has a strong advantage for attracting interns and new graduates as potential employees.
  2. Are we being as creative as we can be in choosing how to give? There are many more ways to give than through cash donations. Brainstorm with your peers, employees and community and nonprofit leaders to generate out-of-box ideas that create an impact, and may boost your reputation for creativity.
  3. How can we better implement our social responsibility efforts? After you select a cause and approach to helping, work through an implementation plan that fits with your strategic objectives and the capabilities of your company and partner(s). Creating a realistic list of desired outcomes and tracking progress on a regular basis will help you monitor success and adjust in real time to achieve maximum benefit.

To gain more insights, listen to our Growth Igniters® Radio conversation with Karen Eber Davis to “How Corporate Philanthropy Can Grow Your Business“

The Surprising Truth About Visionary Leaders

In our work with visionary leaders who are focused on being the disrupters and not the disrupted, we’ve seen that being a visionary can be a bit of a double-edged sword. Perhaps you’ve experienced this yourself or have seen recent business news items that illustrate this issue.

It’s common to lump visionaries into one of two stereotyped camps: either they are the magically charismatic visionaries, or they are the visionaries who are out of touch with the day-to-day, focused solely on the future and frequently incomprehensible to employees and others. But these stereotypes are not the rule.

The surprising truth is that successful visionaries are all around us. These transformative leaders focus not only on the strategic merits of the vision; they also focus on Read More

Where do you stand on the business ethics of digital technology?

We read a compelling article on protecting privacy in the digital age which appeared as the August 19, 2018 cover story of the New York Times Magazine. The huge bold red headline screamed “Big Tech’s War on Privacy.” While this article profiles privacy activists and their push for new legislation to protect Americans, we believe that considering ethics related to digital technology and business models must go beyond which legislation will or won’t be enacted.

The fact is that every business leader needs to take responsibility and accountability for looking at the issue of how what you do in the digital realm affects the trust of your employees, customers, users, partners and other stakeholders. What specifically should you do? Read More