Sat.May 19, 2018 - Fri.May 25, 2018

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Rule #2 of Successful Consulting Firms

David A Fields

A nearby grocer prominently displays a sign proclaiming, “Rule #1: The customer is always right.” That’d never work for consulting because, well, clients aren’t always right. Rule #1 of successful consulting is to remember consulting isn’t about you. It’s about them–the clients. Got it. What’s rule #2? Let’s talk about rules for a moment.

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Bureaucracy Can Drain Your Company’s Energy. Agile Can Restore It.

Harvard Business

Tetra Images/Getty Images. Believe it or not, bureaucracy was once a progressive innovation. Its hierarchical authority, specialized division of labor, and standard operating procedures enabled companies to grow far larger than they had ever been. The German sociologist Max Weber famously praised bureaucracy’s rationality and efficiencies. But Weber also warned that, unfettered, bureaucracy could create a soulless “iron cage,” trapping people inside dehumanizing systems and lim

Agile 43
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WIC Lessons Learned #3 – Leslie Smith

Women in Consulting

By: Amy Huson. #Leslie became a WIC member nearly 20 years ago when she first took the leap to become an independent financial consultant. She had spent a number of years building a career at Bank of America rising to a V.P. of Investments for their Investment Services division working with the banks clients. Having left the bank, she was starting from a blank slate.

Banking 48
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Consulting Fee Structures: 5 Models Ranked from Worst to Best

Consulting Success

Let’s break down the different consulting fee structures that are available to you as a consultant, and then contrast and compare the positives and negatives of each. Hourly Billing for Consultants A very common one is hourly billing. A lot of consultants use hourly fees, and that’s really where a lot of people get started. That’s the status quo for people now.

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PowerPoint Best Practices for Creating Stellar Presentations

Mastering data visualization in PowerPoint will help accelerate your career because it positions you as someone who can present data that drives business decisions forward. think-cell's PowerPoint Best Practices eBook was created specifically for professionals aiming to master the art and science of data-driven storytelling. What’s inside: Practical Insights: Uncover valuable tips for crafting engaging and persuasive presentations.

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One of the Best Ways to Market Yourself as a New Consultant

Steve Shu Consulting

One of the best ways to market yourself as a consultant is by having someone refer you to a client prospect. This type of marketing can be viewed through the lens of “networking by helping someone” (in contrast to networking and just meeting lots of people). These are investments you make to both build your reputation and professional networks. As an example, for one of my first clients as an independent consultant, I got in the door through the referral of an IT systems consultant (met at a loc

Marketing 150

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Do You Truly Value Your Employees?

Actionable

If employees believe they are no more than a number to the organization, then they treat the organization primarily as a means to an income. The post Do You Truly Value Your Employees? appeared first on Actionable.co.

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Retooling Your Skills for Consulting in Media Advertising with Alex Bombeck: Podcast #37

Consulting Success

One of the barriers in a consulting firm is having every form of competition and figuring out how to reinvent yourself to stand out from the crowd. Having the mindset of reinventing yourself plays an integral role when you are a solo consultant because it helps you provide different types of value to clients. President and Managing Director of North Highland, Alex Bombeck, has always believed that retooling and reskilling himself is an effective way.

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Hiring Your Strategic Web Partner to Grow Your Business

Chad Barr

I was recently asked to provide my insights about the following questions, focusing on hiring a strategic web partner to grow your business: 1. What should a consultant or small firm consider when hiring a strategic web partner for their consulting website project? When evaluating the hiring of a web company, there are several key criteria to review: How long have they been in business and what is the stability of the company?

Media 52
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Three Questions to Help You Become a "Yes, And" Leader

Strategy+Business

Approach every conversation as an opportunity to improvise. For more insight, read "Using Improv to Transform How You Lead.

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How to Stay Competitive in the Evolving State of Martech

Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr

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Do You Truly Value Your Employees?

Actionable

If employees believe they are no more than a number to the organization, then they treat the organization primarily as a means to an income. The post Do You Truly Value Your Employees? appeared first on Actionable.co.

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Asking great questions: some notes

Consultants' Consultant

Consultants Consultant: I’m updating my Asking Great Questions / Excellent questions program. Here are some key ideas related to questions. Talk to me if you’d like to have this program in-house. This is NOT an article, it’s a series of important ideas related to questions (so don’t look for a cohesive reasoned narrative, please!

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Is Your Emotional Intelligence Authentic, or Self-Serving?

Harvard Business

Kittiyut Phornphibul/EyeEm/Getty Images. It’s possible to fake emotional intelligence. Similar to knockoffs of luxury watches or handbags, there are emotions and actions that look like the real thing but really aren’t. With the best of intentions, I’ve seen smart leaders charge into sensitive interactions armed with what they believed was a combination of deep empathy, attuned listening, and self-awareness but was, in fact, a way to serve their own emotional needs.

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Three Questions to Help You Become a "Yes, And" Leader

Strategy+Business

Approach every conversation as an opportunity to improvise. For more insight, read "Using Improv to Transform How You Lead.

69
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Savings Consultants Are Needed in Today's Market More Than Ever

Savings Consultants are needed in today’s market more than ever. With an increase in expenses, businesses are looking for opportunities to save. Often unknown to businesses are savings in expense reduction, specialized tax savings, specialized savings including medical underpayments, health benefits cost reduction, zero cost processing, and more. Blue Coast Savings, with over 20 years in business, assists Savings Consultants in helping these companies move toward more profitable businesses.

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What is Design Thinking, and How Does it Impact the Learning Experience?

Clarity Consultants

Design thinking signals a shift away from the traditional slide-based eLearning experiences toward techniques in storytelling and gamification, experimentation in new options for mobile learning, microlearning, video and VR/AR technologies. This has resulted in a fast and sometimes uncomfortable shift in the day-to-day work for an instructional designer, but the foundation in designing for the user is what supports and helps to nourish more engaging and creative learning programs.

Video 43
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Apply “How Little” Thinking to Agile Management Control

Johanna Rothman

Most managers I meet want to do a good job. They want to provide the vision for the people doing the work. They want to provide coaching if people need it. They want to know that people can deliver the outcomes the organization needs and the managers want. As their organizations move to agile approaches, these managers have problems: their organization (managers above them) wants to measure them by the old rules which demand control.

Agile 41
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The Different Words We Use to Describe Male and Female Leaders

Harvard Business

Phil Ashley/Getty Images. We like to think of ourselves as unbiased and objective in our employment decisions, but with two equal candidates, who are you going to promote? Someone who is described in their performance evaluations as analytical or someone who is described as compassionate? On the other end of the employment spectrum, if you’re downsizing and have to fire someone and the two people in jeopardy are very similar, who are you going to fire?

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Art Is Good for Business

Strategy+Business

Whether displaying a corporate art collection in the workplace, providing free museum access to employees, or sponsoring a gallery event, investments in the arts can work to assuage some of the concerns keeping CEOs up at night.

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TOOLS and METHODOLOGIES for developing DECISION SUPPORT PACKAGES

This White Paper targets opportunities for Management to develop proficiency in the Decision Framing and Analyses element of input to Decision, & Risk Analyses for Major Project Funding Decisions.

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The Tower and the Square in the Collaborative Organization Model

Kates Kesler

We recently had the opportunity to speak at a conference of the top 300 leaders in one of our client …

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Looking for Stories of Success with Follow-the-Sun

Johanna Rothman

Mark Kilby and I are almost done with the chapter on geographically dispersed teams with no (or very few) hours of overlap in our book about distributed agile teams. We are looking for any example of a team—agile or not—who successfully used/is using Follow the Sun. Follow the Sun is a great idea. The idea is that one person on the team would start to work on this piece of work.

Agile 41
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How to create an Incentive system for IT team (not working in.

Consulthon

Hello, I am trying to develop a meaningful incentive system for a team that is half colocated and half of the team members are working remotely from other countries. The project they are working.

System 40
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Don't Fight Regulation. Reprogram It

Strategy+Business

Company leaders should think of government regulation as an operating system -- and of their government-relations strategy as writing better code. That means developing a more open relationship in which business leaders and regulators collaborate on rules that serve the needs of both groups.

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Why You Need to Use Case Studies in Sales and Marketing (and How to Start Now)

Case studies are proof of successful client relations and a verifiable product or service. They persuade buyers by highlighting your customers' experiences with your company and its solution. In sales, case studies are crucial pieces of content that can be tailored to prospects' pain points and used throughout the buyer's journey. In marketing, case studies are versatile assets for generating business, providing reusable elements for ad and social media content, website material, and marketing c

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Differentiate yourself by taking a stand against something you don’t like about our industry

Rod Burkert

Greetings from nearby Payson, AZ. We moved all of 12 miles from our last location and are still considered to be in Mogollon “Rim Country.” But now the RV has upgraded cell signal booster and carrier aggregation hardware that will make it easier/faster to pull in the internet AND six roof-mounted solar panels that can generate 1,020 watts of solar power (pretty good, but a far cry from the 1.21 gigawatts needed to go Back to the Future ).

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It wasn’t even a full moon

Martinka Consulting

It was mid-month, not even close to a full moon, when I had three weird and similar situations occur with business owners. An owner told me he would be glad to sell his business, but nobody would see his financial statements or tax returns. Only his CPA and the IRS see them he said. It seems he had sold another business to a consolidator that only cared about revenue.

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Automation Will Make Lifelong Learning a Necessary Part of Work

Harvard Business

bloomberg/Getty Images. President Emmanuel Macron together with many Silicon Valley CEOs will kick off the VivaTech conference in Paris this week with the aim of showcasing the “good” side of technology. Our research highlights some of those benefits, especially the productivity growth and performance gains that automation and artificial intelligence can bring to the economy — and to society more broadly, if these technologies are used to tackle major issues such as fighting di

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Living in a World of Walls: The Backlash to Globalization

Strategy+Business

The second entry in our series of conversations with Ian Bremmer is about nationalism and populism, which will remain potent political forces -- at least until some fundamental issues are addressed.

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ABM Evolution: How Top Marketers Are Using Account-Based Strategies

In times of economic uncertainty, account-based strategies are essential. According to several business analysts and practitioners, ABM is a necessity for creating more predictable revenue. Research shows that nearly three-quarters of marketers (74%) already have the resources needed to build successful ABM programs.