By “weakness” I don’t mean your fondness for Italian cars, your inability to say no to your daughter, or your tendency to overload your dessert plate.

Business-killing weaknesses look more like this:

To successfully grow a business, you need all of the above in abundance. But here’s the thing. YOU

Dan has a management team. He meets with them every Monday to find out what’s going on in the company that he may not already know about. If you ask, you’ll find that they represent the major functional areas of Dan’s business: sales, marketing, technology, operations, customer support, HR and finance.

Sounds good so far, but ….

It feels to Dan as if the place is falling apart. He’s working harder than he’s ever worked before. Every time he solves one problem, there are three more to take its place. The entire company

Well-balanced, agile, powerful management teams make all the difference in the world. (We call them High Performance Management Teams for obvious marketing reasons.) They’re not easy to come by. Sometimes they take years to build. But no CEO with a good management team has ever seriously wished they weren’t there.

Here are ten reasons why it’s

This article lists ten tell-tale signs of an incompetent management team. Author Margaret Heffernan says any one of them should sound a warning bell. More than two – sound the alarm.

Via CBS News. Read more.

Once you’re enjoying the increased results of your new and improved sales process, you may be tempted to sit back and call it done. Not so fast.  Some of the most complex sales processes are never

This is the fifth article I’ve written about increasing sales and profits by improving your sales process. It’s based on years of helping CEOs build bigger and better businesses. We’ve looked at the importance of a formal sales process, how to map out your current process, and testing and improving the process. The series starts here: Sales: Improve Your Process; Improve Your Bottom Line.

In the last article on improving your sales process, I wrote about Testing and Improving the results you’re getting. This means breaking down your process into individual tasks and challenging the

“High Performance Digest” (formerly “News You Can Use”) is a somewhat weekly summary of interesting and potentially useful recently published articles, research, books and anything else that I think you might find helpful. Sometimes I toss in my own thoughts and sometimes I just give it to you to as it is.

Firing is rarely fun for anybody; but according to author Jeff Hayden, it would behoove us to remember that as uncomfortable as you may feel firing someone, it’s actually worse on them. Here

Same thing happens to some businesses.

Just like with a car, if no one pays attention, your company can get out of whack. People start heading off in different directions, working on their own priorities, putting out fires, possibly creating them, and generally focusing on the wrong things. As this happens, your business gets less and less efficient, less and

The whole point of sales process management, of course, is to get better at securing new customers or new projects. Any step in the process – including those that are not yet part of the process – is fair game.

Cirque du Soleil, from its game-changing revamp of the traditional circus model to its rapid, global expansion, is an often-used example of success. According to Wikipedia (yes – I was too lazy to look any farther), “Cirque expanded rapidly through the 1990s and 2000s, going from one show to 19 shows in over 271 cities