Bite Sized Business Tips
2 minute reads for the values-led business leader
Snippets for purpose and values-led business leaders about meeting our responsibilities to our team, customers, owners, communities and suppliers. Context is everything, so these aren't dogma - rather a stimulus for thought. Subscribe below.
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Leading in crisis (1) – Values
{Leading in crisis - Video 1 of 5, Values} There's this great quote about Abraham Lincoln that I love. "If you wish to know what a man really is, give him power". (Note that if you look at the relative success that many countries with female leaders have had dealing ...
The need to lead
If you're a business leader, your leadership will not be defined more clearly than it is right now. How you lead your team will deepen trust. Or shatter it. We're facing extreme uncertainty. High stakes. Health AND livelihoods at risk. How do you lead through it? Most important, lead with ...
Is your policy serving a purpose or masking your inability to deal with uncertainty?
Are your policies up to scratch? Consider this. True story. For 11 years, a company has an expense policy that says "don't take the piss". That's it. Not a word more. This serves them well for 11 years. Then, one night at a works drinks gathering, someone orders a several-hundred ...
Remote working increases your need to align at 4 levels
Remote working should force most business leaders to think hard about how they lead. Especially as tomorrow's world of work will be a lot more remote than yesterday's. For many team members, it creates much higher levels of independence than they've felt in an office. That level of autonomy can ...
What do you want to rebuild?
We've been forced into an opportunity. Top of mind for every CEO is team, then cash flow. Maintain sales and payment, and control cost. Rightly so. No cash flow, no business. But unless you're planning to rebuild a business that just goes from hand to mouth, you also need to ...
This time may be testing your values
What does a values-led business do in the current climate? Well, it can do a lot actually. Reach out to clients to deepen relationships rather than transact. Explore how to provide stability for its workforce through times of volatility. Honour its suppliers where it can, or find ways to minimise ...
Making commitments is easy. Delivering them, not so much.
A diversified portfolio is a really bad idea when it comes to strategic initiatives. A big part of my work is helping SMEs and scale-ups turn their vision, values and strategies into reality. How do we take a list of goals, or our grand vision, or what we say we ...
Leaders grow fastest in service of something far bigger than themselves
My times of most significant growth at work always came when I was serving something bigger. Turning around a very dispirited team, the most obvious thing for me was to put myself in their service. And to do it in action, not just in words. It wasn't some grand sacrifice ...
When is it enough?
One of the truly beautiful consequences of building a company serving a purpose bigger than itself is that the enormity of the mission can free you from unhealthy personal or financial ambition. When you build with a deep rooted desire to make a difference, a dent in something you care ...
Netflix and Blockbuster – the key lesson isn’t the one that’s in the lore
Nearly a decade after the demise of Blockbuster, we still hear it often cited as an example of the failure to see or act on innovation. It's still bandied about as a lesson in how a dominant player can be disrupted out of existence. But that's not the real lesson ...
I wish you a happy journey for 2020
The journey is everything. For the last 15 or so years of my life, I’ve been realising more and more that everything we do is just a journey, and that we never get to the destination. And that this is a good thing. In all areas of our lives, including ...
Be kind in business, and not for the ROI
Given the current vitriolic and disrespectful state of politics and citizenship in the UK and US, I am worried that we're in danger of losing kindness as a core value of life and relationships. So I just did a search for "kindness in business" on Google. And the results were ...
