Change at N2growth
Posted on February 8th, 2010 by admin in Blogging & Social Media, Communications
By Mike Myatt, Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth
While all of you were enjoying your weekend, watching the Super Bowl or otherwise recreating in leisure, the N2growth team was hard at work launching our new website and blog. We’ve blended some of the old with some of the new to create the next step forward in the N2growth brand evolution. We invite you to look around (please let us know if you find any bugs) and we welcome your feedback. We hope you find our efforts more pleasing to the eye, easier to navigate, but most of all, we hope it encourages more dialogue and conversation. We look forward to your comments, tweets and emails. Thanks for your patience during this transition.
While success is normally considered to be a good thing, unless you’re prepared to handle it, success can quickly complicate your life. Even worse, without the proper perspective, success can actually contribute to the beginning of your downfall. So my question is this: Is your success serving as a springboard for even greater success, or is it merely a temporary state, precariously positioned and ready to implode with the slightest change in circumstance? As strange as it may sound, success can often times be the precursor to failure. Success without perspective, purpose, and focus can actually cause more harm than good. In today’s post I’ll discuss how CEOs and entrepreneurs can either leverage success, or if they’re not careful, have it serve as a catalyst for a rapid downward spiral…
“Finding The Zone” is a concept that most athletes are familiar with, but what about CEOs? We’ve all heard the sportscaster refer to an athlete as being in “the zone,” and so my question is this: “How do you find your performance zone as a CEO?” or better yet, “How do you find and remain in the leadership zone?” What respectable chief executive wouldn’t want to function at their best more often than they currently do? Wouldn’t it be a marvelous thing to be able to place yourself in the zone when needed? In today’s post I’ll provide some tips for CEOs to help them be successful in Finding the zone…
Whether you want to admit it or not, competition is part of your world, and likely a bigger part than you’d care to admit. Granted, exploiting the competition is not a novel concept. Even so, it is still very common to hear many executives adopt a competition neutral position. These executives simply don’t believe competition to be a significant factor in the execution of their business plan. While this may make for a nice sound bite, I don’t buy it, and if they’re truly honest with themselves, neither do they. In business you can either choose to deal with your competition (even if that means partnering with them), or you can opt to stand idly by and let the competition eat your lunch. In today’s post I’ll share my thoughts on the proper way to view your competition and how to identify competitive threats…
In recent months I have observed a decent amount of politically correct discourse on the topic of team building and equality. The gist of the argument seems to be that for teams to be productive, employees have to feel “empowered” by having an equal voice. I can sum-up my feeling on this in one word…ridiculous. To be blunt, the concept of equality in the workplace has only made team building more difficult as employees seem to have a sense of undeserved entitlement with regard to their roles and responsibilities. And as odd as it may sound, one of the greatest impediments to building productive teams is practicing management by consensus. In today’s post I’ll share my thoughts on team building and equality…
There has been an interesting amount of chatter of late around the concept of “when to lead.” What puzzles me is this statement’s inference that there must be a good time to not lead. I couldn’t disagree more – Leadership is an always on, full-time endeavor. There’s an old joke that says leaders don’t have time off, they just have moments of down time. What real leaders know all too well is they’re evaluated every bit as harshly, and sometimes more harshly, on the choices made during their down time. When you’re in a leadership role everything you do is on the clock. In today’s post I’ll examine the fallacy of leading by not leading.
In thinking about the comments I’ve received from readers on the topic of leadership I noticed an interesting paradox…while many of you vehemently disagree on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of different leadership styles, most of you are in total agreement on the qualities and attributes possessed by great leaders regardless of style. In further pondering this dichotomy an interesting thought came to mind – If I could genetically engineer the perfect leadership gene what qualities and characteristics would constitute the architecture of leadership DNA? In today’s blog post I’ll attempt to paint the portrait of the perfect leader…
There is simply no substitute for the truth. That said, how do you measure a person’s positional conviction? How do you know if someone is sincere in their communication? How do you know if you’re being told the truth, or just being spoken to in a manner designed to elicit a desired response? Listen to what’s being said…When attempting to evaluate the shifting sands of fluid messaging, or what I like to refer to as spin, examine the choice of words used in the composition of said messaging.
I’ve written in the past about how important it is for the CEO not to sequester him or herself away in the corner office. Operating in a vacuum, and being out of touch is never a good position to find yourself in as the CEO. I have consistently espoused the value of walking the floor, dropping in on meetings on an impromptu basis, taking employees of all ranks to lunch, and any number of other items that focus on raising your internal awareness. In today’s post I’ll focus my comments on the value for CEOs of raising their external awareness…
The topic of “Employee Engagement” is something that many CEOs tend to struggle with. Long gone are the days where the executive leadership of a company can remain sequestered in their offices with an internal focus on hard metrics. Given the current economic climate, it takes far more than cost-cutting to survive. It is the CEO who understands the need for focus on the soft metrics of customer centricity and employee engagement that will create sustainable growth in revenue and brand equity. In today’s post I’ll examine the need to have a fully engaged work force… 