Managing-Leading Edge Index

“The Managing-Leading Edge” was originally a series of newsletters produced by Lawrimore Inc. President Buck Lawrimore around the early 2000’s. Most of this information is indeed “leading edge” and just as relevant today as it was then. So enjoy your reading and get a quick shot of some of the best business books written in recent years!

What do the world’s greatest managers do differently? That question was
recently asked by the Gallup Organization through in-depth interviews of
over 80,000 managers in over 400 companies. This is the largest study of
its kind ever undertaken, and the result is one of the top-selling books in
the nation right now: First, Break All The Rules: What the World’s
Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman
(Simon & Schuster, 1999).

The authors identified 12 questions which absolutely nail the practices of
best managers. See if you think people working for you would answer “yes”
to them:
“1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?”
“2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?”
“3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?”
“4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for
good work?”Read More→

Effective Marketing Strategy 2 – Analyze Your Strengths

How To Analyze the Organization’s Strengths and Limitations

a. Determine Your Strengths

In Part 1, we stated that building on your strengths is key to effective marketing strategy. What are your strengths? From a marketing strategy perspective, your strengths have several dimensions:

(1) Your natural, genetic strengths. Each of us was born with a certain personality type and certain talents or gifts. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most widely used personality profiling assessment tool in the world and one we recommend highly to help you and all your employees or team members understand their natural strengths and preferences. You and your people may also have natural talents for selling, research, planning, writing, designing, strategy or other dimensions of marketing and business just as surely as some people have natural talent for playing the piano or throwing footballs. You know you have a talent because it is something you do better than most other people, naturally. That is something you can build on for competitive advantage, especially if it is relevant. (A musical talent might not be relevant if your product is battery chargers.)

The Importance of Capacity Development In Business-Organization Success

An organization’s capabilities to implement a strategic plan or other major business initiative depends on its capacity to do more without a big increase in people or expenses. This is a factor often overlooked by business and nonprofit leadership as they plan for the future.

Recently, thanks to some consulting we are doing for a local organization and to some relevant insights from James Clear, it also became “clear” to us that developing more capacity depends on process improvement, and process improvement depends on changing habits. This is a big deal and important to understand.

How are you going to get your people to do more without spending more in the coming year and beyond? You have to motivate them, guide them and reward them for doing things they are not doing now! If they do the same things Read More→

How To Develop An Effective Marketing Strategy 1- Determine Your Purposes

This is the first in a series of posts about: How To Develop An Effective Marketing Strategy. Step 1 is: Determine Your Purposes

“Begin with the end in mind” is a well-known saying in business popularized by Stephen Covey in his famous 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Many other consultants and authors have pointed out the great importance of having a clear purpose. Human beings are naturally goal oriented, and without stated purposes the people in any organization can pursue their own personal interests – whatever feels right to them, thus dispersing the resources of the company and not accomplishing very much as a team.

Strategic Planning In The 21st Century – What Works Now

Strategic planning evolved in the second half of the 20^th Century, after World War II, as a way to apply methods that worked effectively in warfare to peacetime situations, especially in industry. Today the world is so different and fast-changing, old-style strategic planning can be a self-defeating waste of time, money and resources, yet certain fundamentals are still valuable. It is important to understand what works now in order to make good management and leadership decisions in the 21^st Century.

Emails Not Getting Through? New DMARC Rules May Be The Reason

DMARC is a new standard for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance” (more at http://www.dmarc.org). Basically it means that if you or your website or your software send an email where the “from” field is not the same as the domain actually sending the website, then AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and others are likely to consider it spam and bounce it back.