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Archive for the ‘financial decision-making’ Category

Doing Business in the Big Leagues: Be Smart, Bold, Careful, and Thoughtful

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

By William Seidman

A recent article by Maureen Farrell in Forbes.com, “Doing Business With The Big Boys,” discusses several ways in which smaller companies, eager to do business in the big leagues, got burned - or at least chastised.  The gist of the warning is:

If you’re signing a contract, you need a lawyer. Then check out that big company thoroughly, proceed with caution, be prepared, get it in writing, make sure you have read and understand ALL the fine print - and then read it again.  I’m profiled and quoted (though Cerebyte is in beautiful Lake Oswego, Oregon - and not the nonexistent location Lake Oswego, Canada!) because it’s happened to us, too. We dealt with a senior manager who, in fact, didn’t have the decision-making authority we’d thought he had. Ouch. But it won’t ever happen to us again, and needn’t happen to you.

 

 

Posted in best practices, business, financial decision-making, leadership | No Comments »

Don’t Panic - Optimize Your Attitude and Your Company

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

By William Seidman

In the midst of chaos, maybe more now than ever, attitude matters. How you handle yourself and your company in the midst of worldwide financial turmoil now matters a lot. The tendency is for companies to react by immediately and drastically cutting costs, because costs are controllable and cutting them appears to solve part of the problem quickly. This can be destructive, though : don’t destroy the assets and capabilities you need for recovery.

A better way to think about the current downward spiral is to remember that instability requires optimization. Reducing costs may be part of that optimization, but so is improving productivity. If you haven’t already, identify your best people and commit to cutting costs and improving productivity. Optimization and a positive attitude are complementary.

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Posted in financial crisis, financial decision-making, knowledge workers, optimization | No Comments »

New Behaviors Take More than 6 Weeks to “Stick”

Sunday, August 3rd, 2008

By RG

Bill Seidman and I were working with IT people inside a large corporation. The told us upfront that IT had a bad reputation in the company and was held in poor regard by the business units. How to solve this?

Background: the IT department’s policy was to implement the company’s proscribed changes and to be available for up to six weeks afterwards, to help. So what could be wrong with this model? We talked about the importance of sustaining new behaviors and how at 6-8 weeks, a person going through a change process will have a crisis in which the new neural pathways are not yet the only pathways, an inner struggle ensues, and -more often than not - they regress to the old habits. It’s for just this reason that IT groups must stick around to help people at the critical juncture. We need them more, not less, after the 6-week mark. Once people are over the hump, the IT people can move on.

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Posted in business, financial decision-making, getting change to "stick", organizational change, personal change | No Comments »

 
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