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C-Suite Hiring When You’re Scaling For Growth

Finding the right talent for the C-suite when you’re scaling your company for growth is its own special challenge. You’re creating new positions with new accountabilities, and the need to fill the position is extremely urgent. With this combination of navigating the unknown and time pressure, it’s common to end up with mismatches.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review titled Why CMOs Never Last sheds new light on this issue. Although the authors focus on the Chief Marketing Officer (the C-suite position with the highest turnover), you can expand on their insights Read More

Good News For Visionary Leaders Of Companies With Beloved Brands

If you are the visionary leader of an old, established company with beloved brands, one of the major challenges you may face is innovating and growing to keep pace with customers’ changing expectations due to digital technology. It’s a delicate balancing act.

On the one hand, to stay relevant and realize untapped opportunities, it’s essential to lead your organization in constantly reimagining even your most beloved brands. On the other hand, it’s also essential to preserve the magic that has made your brands so special. To do otherwise puts your organization at risk of being disrupted by more agile competitors or alienating loyal customers.

The good news is that it is possible for you to navigate this high-stakes journey.

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How Can You Increase the Quality of Decisions In The Digital Age?

Perhaps, like us, you’ve been seeing articles about a highly disruptive innovation that’s celebrating it’s 50th anniversary this year. The ATM is widely considered to be the beginning of the 24/7 service culture that transformed banking and business practices.

This helped usher in the digital age that has transformed world culture, including how we make decisions about all kinds of matters beyond banking.

Today, the collective comfort with machine-human transactions has spilled over to create the increasingly transactional nature of much human-human communication enabled by email, text messaging, Twitter, Slack messaging, and more.

Although digital interaction is often perfect for straightforward information or quick transactions, it’s not the best choice for making decisions that have a strong impact.

While we all know this, the convenience of digital interaction makes it all too easy to inadvertently get caught up in a transactional approach to strategic interactions. Here’s how it can happen, and what to do about it…

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How Can You Best Help Small Businesses After the Hurricanes?

In the wake of the one-two punch of hurricanes Harvey and Irma, our thoughts and prayers go out to those affected by these terrible storms.

While immediate cash donations to relief organizations are very helpful, contributing goods and services that are unique to us as individuals or companies can be even more meaningful to those who need help. This is especially the case for local businesses that have been especially hard-hit and have long-term needs.

For example, like many others, we made cash donations for general relief immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. However, about 18 months later I (Pam) read that many business owners were still struggling to bounce back after the initial burst of attention and funding had faded. Since I was going to New Orleans on vacation, I connected with contacts at the U.S. Small Business Administration / Office of Small Business Development Centers who arranged for me to provide pro-bono strategic advisory help to several businesses that had been affected by the storm.

The company owners that I worked with were highly appreciative of this help so long after the flurry of attention had faded. It was also incredibly uplifting to listen to their stories of how they were persevering and living into their purpose despite many challenges. Going forward, I offered the same short-term and long-term-oriented assistance to small businesses in the New York metro area following Superstorm Sandy and will do the same for businesses affected by these recent storms as well.

For many local businesses, disaster recovery is extremely rough. Challenges include loss of customers, facilities, staff, limited resources, and more. It can easily take months or even years to bounce back. So before deciding the best way to help after the hurricanes or other disasters, ask “What types of help can I/we provide in both the short term and the long term that would be most meaningful to those in need?

Photo credit Copyright flynt / 123RF Stock Photo

Pam Harper on The Small Business Advocate Radio Show: Top Traits of Game-Changer CEOs

Listen to Pam Harper’s interview on The Small Business Advocate Radio Show® with host Jim Blasingame. In the tenth year of Pam’s membership in Jim’s “Brain Trust,” Pam and Jim talk about the traits and attributes that take a CEO from a good leader to a Game-Changer.

Check out the conversation by clicking on the “Listen Now” Buttons below. Each segment is between 5 to 10 minutes long.
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Pam Harper on The Small Business Advocate Radio Show: Keeping Your Values Relevant as You Grow

Listen to Pam Harper’s interview on The Small Business Advocate Radio Show with host Jim Blasingame. In this tenth-year anniversary of Pam’s membership in Jim’s “Brain Trust,” Pam and Jim talk about what it takes to keep your values as a relevant guide, even as your company scales and transforms.

Check out the conversation by clicking on the “Listen Now” Buttons below. Each segment is between 5 to 10 minutes long.
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Lessons From a Big Mistake – The 2017 Oscars Best Picture Mix-up

The Oscar Goes To...Inevitably, no matter how many fail-safe systems you put into place, mistakes are going to happen. How would you have responded to the Big Mistake during the 89th Oscars?  And what are some of the lessons we can all learn from this story?

Here’s a quick recap: the final moments of the 2017 Academy Awards event were upended by a remarkable mix-up where Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, the presenters for best picture award, mistakenly announced that LaLa Land was the winner. Of course, minutes later, we all found out that the real winner was Moonlight.

The reaction in the Dolby Theater and with viewers around the world?  Shock and confusion for those watching mixed with mild chaos on stage. Even Hollywood couldn’t dream up this story line. We were watching live and at first, it seemed like just one of the many pranks that had been happening during the program. Until reality set in. Read More

How Can You Make Better Decisions When Even Reality is Subjective?

Copyright: jordi2r / 123RF Stock Photo

This morning we listened to a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition titled “Don’t Think Your Bias Can Boss You Around? David Byrne Says Think Again”

The story was about how Byrne, founder of the rock band Talking Heads, decided to create an experiential theater piece called “The Institute Presents: Neurosociety” at Pace Art + Technology in Menlo Park, California. The experience takes a playful dive into how our brains can be influenced by cognitive biases to draw conclusions and make decisions that may not match up with objective reality (whatever that is). You can listen to the NPR piece by clicking below.
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Listen to Pam Harper’s Interview on Staying Ahead of The Competitive Pack

Listen to Pam Harper’s interview on The Small Business Advocate Radio Show with host Jim Blasingame. In this tenth-year anniversary of Pam’s membership in Jim’s “Brain Trust,” Pam and Jim talk about what it takes to stay ahead of the curve in today’s hypercompetitive environment.

Check out the conversation by clicking on the “Listen Now” Buttons below. Each segment is between 5 to 10 minutes long.
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Listen to Pam Harper’s Radio Interview with Kelly Scanlon about How to Be the Disruptor, Not the Disrupted

In these turbulent times, companies of all sizes and stages of growth are at increasing risk of being upended by technologies and competitors that can seemingly come out of nowhere with just a moment’s notice.  How can you lead your company to not just keep up, but move at the forefront of change?

Listen to Pam Harper’s interview on Smart Companies with Kelly Scanlon: Be The Disrupter By Getting Ahead of The Curve With Author Pamela S. Harper.

Want to Dig Deeper?

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