Amanda Setili provides business intelligence from a small business owner who found a solution to the issue of finding workers during the pandemic.  “Like many businesses, Dan & Whit’s General Store in Norwich, Vermont has been having a problem finding enough workers. Out of desperation, they came up with an out-of-the-box solution. One longtime customer recalls the email she received from the store’s owner. It said, “You want to do yoga? Come into Dan and Whit’s. Breath. Grab a can…

Often the best-laid strategies of consultants come to a grinding halt at the people level. Amanda Setili shares a post that offers a few practical steps you can take to encourage others to take action. The biggest obstacle to your progress is often something you can’t see, hear or even name. It is not something tangible and obvious. The biggest obstacle is… a quiet unwillingness—perhaps even reluctance—to do the things that you need someone to do. You ask Engineering to…

Bernie Heine explains why your employees are key to the public perception of your brand, and what you should do to ensure a positive message is shared. A recent study found that about 64% of global consumers have avoided a brand because of a bad experience they had within the past year. Almost half say they have avoided a company because of its reputation or negative social reviews. We’ve seen this happen many times, even with big corporations. For example,…

  Jared Simmons explains why simplifying assumptions could be the key to unlocking value faster and freeing up your knowledge workers to innovate. I learned the power of simplifying assumptions early in my career. As an engineering student, I watched my professors fill boards with Greek letters and symbols, exponents and integrals, constants and variables. Then, in the last 10 minutes of class we worked a real problem together. The first step of solving the real problem was always to…

Amanda Setili shines a light on an initiative that sparked employee engagement, inspired innovation, and motivated collaboration.    What does a 110-year-old company do to increase the rate of innovation from less than one new business per year to 50?  The answer, says David Lee, Vice President of Innovation and New Ventures at UPS, is to launch a program that taps into the brilliant growth ideas lurking in the heads of many of its 480,000 employees.  The program is called…

Susan Drumm provides four steps to ensure you will get honest feedback from your team. Do you think you can get your team to give you honest feedback? Like no-holds-barred honest?   Many of my clients tell me they struggle to get real feedback from their direct reports and I’m not surprised. Does this story sound familiar? One of my senior clients recently received the results of his 360 report and was surprised to learn that his team felt they weren’t being…

Jesse Jacoby identifies a few of the core issues that can arise when bringing a new manager into the workplace. Good things are possible when new managerial blood is brought into an organization. For one thing, there are often fresh ideas. You know yourself how easy it is to get so close to something that you can’t see the forest for the trees. You can’t see a solution that’s obvious to someone from the outside. And, of course, if you…