Caught In The Act: How to acknowledge people without turning them off

The best form of acknowledgment is grounded in the idea that people work because they are committed and want to work. This assumes people work for reasons other than a paycheque at the end of the week or an award at the end of a project.

Negotiating Skills: Success Tips

Six tips that will help you improve the outcomes of your negotiations.

Incorporating You

There’s a lot that can go right and wrong in a business. A lot of it out of your control. But the extent of your personal financial liability for what goes wrong is one thing you can and should control.

Unethical Negotiating Gambits and How to Protect Yourself Against Them

Unless you’re so familiar with the unethical gambits that people can use to get you to sweeten the deal that you spot them right away, you’ll find that you will make unnecessary concessions just to get the other side to agree with your proposal.

Why Do People Say “Yes?”: The “6 Weapons of Influence”

The Six Weapons of Influence are incredibly powerful and can be combined in many ways. Use them whenever you approach people you want to influence.

Edward De Bono

If every valuable creative idea is logical in hindsight, then it is only natural to suppose, and to claim, that such ideas could have been reached by logic in the first place and that creativity is unnecessary. That is the main reason why, culturally, we have never paid serious attention to creativity.

Yearly Employee Evaluations and Rating Inflation

Many organizations annually inflate yearly employee evaluations. As a result, managers lose the ability to highlight top performance, or distinguish among outcomes and behaviors. In other words, they lose – or abdicate – the responsibility to manage and lead.

Are You A Leader? Part I: The Leadership Self Test

As today’s organizations become more and more lean, people in business are gaining a greater appreciation for the differences between a manager’s style of thinking and a leader’s style of thinking. If you’re curious about how much you think like a leader versus thinking like a manager, answer these fifteen True or False questions.

Creating Customer Loyalty: The Customer Loyalty Grid™

What makes a loyal customer? One who speaks loudly and with fervor about your organization, telling others how you have made a real and positive difference in their lives? In a word…expectations.

Key Steps in Collaborative Problem Solving

Six key steps in applying a collaborative problem solving style of conflict management.

Becoming a Successful Mentor

We hear a lot about “business mentoring” as leaders, but much of what we hear sounds so fuzzy! Still, helping people learn and guiding their growth are critical to leadership development – no “leader” can be really successful without becoming a good business mentor.

Employment Standards Regulations

Links to employement standards regulations in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Cashing Out … What Is Your Business REALLY Worth

Here’s a quick primer of the various methodologies commonly used for valuing businesses (for purposes of imminent sale or otherwise).