2024

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Inside the Mind of a Transitioning CEO: Key Strategies for Effective Leadership

Strategic Planning and Management Insights

Transitioning into the role of a CEO is one of the most significant leaps in any executive’s career. It’s a step filled with new responsibilities, challenges, and opportunities that require a different set of skills and mindset compared to other leadership positions. This transition isn't just about leading an organization; it's about evolving into a leader who can guide a company through its most critical phases of growth, change, or crisis.

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Keep Strategy Simple

Harvard Business

Few companies have a clear idea of where strategy making ends and execution begins. As a result they develop strategic plans where they’re not required and fail to develop strategic plans where they are. To help prevent this happening to your Graham Kenny offers a few dos and don’ts: (1) Don’t develop strategic plans for functions; (2) Confine “strategy” to the business level; (3) Keep strategy and action separate; and (4) Be careful how you use the terms “strategy” and “strategic.

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Small Businesses Reducing Workers for the Last Four Months

MishTalk

ADP data shows small businesses with 1-49 workers have been reducing workers for four months. Those with 25-49 workers have shed workers for 7 straight months.

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Key Recession Indicator Gives Stronger Recession Signal in August

MishTalk

A modified McKelvey recession indicator with no false positives or false negatives since 1953 suggests we are in recession now. 100 percent of the time, with no false positives or negatives, under current conditions, the economy has been in recession. What is the McKelvey Recession Indicator?

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Pricing for Profit: How to Set, Negotiate, and Succeed

Speaker: Igli Laci, Strategic Finance Leader

In today’s competitive market, pricing is more than just a number — it’s the cornerstone of profitability. The right pricing strategy ensures that you capture the true value of your offering, paving the way for sustainable growth and long-term success. Join Igli Laci, Strategic Finance Leader, in this exclusive session where he will explore how a well-crafted pricing approach balances customer perception with business objectives, creating a powerful tool for securing both competitive advantage a

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Why “Wisdom Work” Is the New “Knowledge Work”

Harvard Business

Today the workforce is getting older, and the number of younger workers in positions of senior management is growing. These two developments might appear to spell trouble, in that they seem to set the generations against one another, but the author of this article argues that in fact they represent an important opportunity: If companies can figure out how to enable the intergenerational transfer of the wisdom that comes with age and experience, they can strengthen themselves — and the workplace

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6 Ways to Bring Strategy into Your Work Every Day

Harvard Business

Business leaders are expected to be strategic, and while organizational obstacles can prevent you from translating intent into strategic actions, so can your personal limitations and practices. It doesn’t have to be this way. Even when it feels like the odds are stacked against you, you have more choices than you may realize. Small decisions about where to focus and what to do throughout your day may feel inconsequential, but their impacts accumulate.

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How to Integrate Cloud, Data, and AI Technologies — and Make Your Company More Adaptable

Harvard Business

Building a strong, flexible “digital core” that integrates cloud, data, and AI technologies to serve as an interconnected foundation for your company is the key to future growth. It is your means of supporting the current business drive toward efficiency and effectiveness, while remaining flexible enough to respond to the new needs of the organization and quickly adopt and scale the latest technology innovations.

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How AI Can Change the Way Your Company Gets Work Done

Harvard Business

AI offers many ways to enhance a company’s overall internal capabilities and skills. AI can be used to infer skills from employee profiles and their activity. AI can be used to classify learning content and make it more applicable and accessible for the whole workforce, as well as making learning more personalized to each individual. AI can be used to summarize, recommend, and augment learning content.

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The Limits of GenAI Educators

Harvard Business

While generative AI tools have been heralded as the future of education, more than 40 years of academic research suggests that it could also harm learning in realms from online tutoring to employee training for three reasons. First, the best student-teacher relationships are empathetic ones but it is biologically impossible for humans and AI to develop mutual empathy.

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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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4 Pillars of Innovation Every Organization Needs

Harvard Business

Innovation doesn’t just come from serendipity. Leaders who nurture great ideas rely on concrete mechanisms to ensure that they see the right ideas, give them breathing room to development, and connect dots throughout their organizations. In any company, the challenge with innovation is seldom the volume of ideas. The challenge lies with having ideas that are related to emerging trends, involve more than the company can do on its own, require nurturing, and are cross-functional in nature.

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Margin Calls Trigger Huge Global Equities and Bitcoin Selloff, Gold Fine

MishTalk

The Nikkei is down 13.5% in the last 5 days. Bitcoin is down 7% today and 23 percent in the last week. 18-year high margin positions hitting everything but gold.

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The Most Strategic Leaders Excel in 4 Disciplines

Harvard Business

Strategic fitness is a leader’s ability to learn from and adapt to their environment to set direction and create a competitive advantage. A study of 77 C-suite executives over four years found that strategically fit leaders excel in four disciplines : 1) Strategic fitness, or setting clear direction and calibrating when necessary; 2) Leadership fitness, or refining their style to meet the moment; 3) Organizational fitness, or investing in thinking about the future state of the business; and 4) C

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How to Improve Women’s Advancement Programs

Harvard Business

Most corporate women’s advancement programs center on teaching women a predefined slate of skills purported to give them more control over their careers. But by taking this approach, companies may be unintentionally communicating a culture of conformity by asking women to change who they are to succeed. This leaves many women, especially senior women, feeling stuck, because strong leaders need to have the ability to set expectations, not just fulfill them.

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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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How to Kickstart Your Post-Summer Career Development

Harvard Business

Using the end of the summer to reset your approach to development can create new energy for your career. Instead of feeling like another thing to fit in, it can be a new source of motivation that supports everything else you’re trying to do. The idea is to identify actions that will kick-start your learning in a way that’s easy to add into your day.

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Creating Stability Is Just as Important as Managing Change

Harvard Business

When we think about change at work today, we tend to assume its inevitability and focus our attention on how to manage it — what methods and processes and technology and communication we need to put in place to have it move ahead more smoothly. Of course, some change is necessary, and some is inevitable. But not all of it. What the scientific literature on predictability, agency, belonging, place, and meaning suggests is that before we think about managing change, we should consider the conditio

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All Business Strategies Fall into 4 Categories

Harvard Business

The problem with strategy frameworks is that although they can help you determine whether an opportunity is attractive or whether a given strategy is likely to work, they generally don’t help you in the task of identifying the opportunity or crafting the strategy in the first place. This article introduces a framework, built on an in-depth analysis of the creativity literature, that aims to fill that gap by providing a systematic approach to identifying potential strategies.

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How to Get Your Team to Actually Speak Up

Harvard Business

There is a common leadership misconception that merely encouraging team members to voice their opinions will foster an environment of openness. But people won’t speak up unless they feel safe doing so. As a leader, this means you have to address the underlying reasons for employee reticence, including the individual and systemic barriers to speaking up.

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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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How AI Can Make Make Us Better Leaders

Harvard Business

Humans are good at inventing tools, but not as good at adapting to the change these tools can cause. While there has been much focus on the technical impacts and potential dark side of AI, the authors’ research has shown that AI can enhance and empower leadership, actually helping make leaders more human. To do this, we need to invest just as much in the development of our human potential as we do in harnessing the power of AI.

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Learning to Delegate as a First-Time Manager

Harvard Business

Learning how to delegate well is a skill every first-time manager needs to learn from the very start. Many people are promoted into management for doing their previous job well. But once you’re promoted into a leadership role, you must accept that you can’t do everything on your own — nor should you. Though it may seem counterintuitive, the more senior you become in an organization, the less you’ll be involved in doing the day-to-day work.

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How Starbucks Devalued Its Own Brand

Harvard Business

Starbucks is struggling. It has strayed from its successful strategy of offering customers exceptional experiences and, in the process, has commoditized itself. This article analyzes where it went wrong and offers ideas for how the company can turn itself around. It holds lessons for other companies that compete by providing customers distinctive experiences.

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How to Present to an Audience That Knows More Than You

Harvard Business

What happens when you have to give a presentation to an audience that might have some professionals who have more expertise on the topic than you do? While it can be intimidating, it can also be an opportunity to leverage their deep and diverse expertise in service of the group’s learning. And it’s an opportunity to exercise some intellectual humility, which includes having respect for other viewpoints, not being intellectually overconfident, separating your ego from your intellect, and being wi

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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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3 Ways to Clearly Communicate Your Company’s Strategy

Harvard Business

For all the communication around strategy, we know that leaders at many companies don’t provide the necessary context for employees to understand what the words and sentences in a strategy statement actually mean. What can leaders do to help employees understand enough context to understand a strategy? In this article, the authors offer three recommendations: 1) Present the alternatives considered and explain why they were not adopted. 2) Explain how each choice is linked to the organization’s p

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The Gap Between Real GDP and GDI Increases to New Record $616 Billion

MishTalk

The BEA revised GDP from 2.8 percent in the second quarter to 3.0 percent. The much more believable number is GDI at 1.3 percent and expect negative revisions to that.

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You Need New Skills to Make a Career Pivot. Here’s How to Find the Time to Build Them.

Harvard Business

With any significant change in your career comes the need for new skills. But that’s even more true when you want a radical career change. In these situations, it’s going to take more than listening to a few webinars to build the knowledge you need get to where you want to go. You must set aside a significant amount of time for self-directed learning, formal training, or even a second job to gain the skills for the big leap.

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Does Your Boss Practice Toxic Positivity?

Harvard Business

Being happy and positive at work can be a win-win for employees and organizations. But what happens when your boss practices toxic positivity? No matter how bad or stressful the situation is or how difficult the circumstances, they convince themselves that simply acting happy or thinking positively will change the outcome — then spread this toxic positivity to their teams.

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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