6 Simple Growth Hacks for Startups

  Building a new business is tough. These strategies will help your startup succeed without a big investment.   As many of my readers know, I usually write about strategy, innovation, and leadership. But recently I’ve been asked a lot about how I helped establish Praxie.com as a destination website for hundreds of best practice…

Don’t Lose Your Best People. Use the 9-Box Grid to Grow Your Future Talent.

  Keep and develop your best people to create a high-performance culture and competitive advantage.   Hiring good people is tough. Retaining your best talent can be equally challenging. In today’s disruptive world, competitive advantage relies as much on people as it does technology. So, how do you objectively know which people are your all-stars, especially in a bigger…

Empathy: The Currency of Human Connection—and Innovation.

Having worked with innovation teams from global companies like Visa, Colgate-Palmolive, Kimberly-Clark, Disney, Medtronic and many others, there’s one consistent success factor when it comes to innovation, no matter what you’re doing: it all starts with the customer. Companies spend oodles of time and money trying to understand customers. They conduct surveys, hire market researchers, run…

Use “Calculated Optimism”​ for More Strategic Decisions

Harvard Research Suggests Pessimism Is Bad for Business. Replace pessimism with “calculated optimism” for better decision-making. Research from Harvard University looked at whether people were afraid of various situations or objects, such as being stuck in enclosed places or coming face-to-face with snakes. These same individuals were asked to estimate the number of fatalities each year…

How to See Your Hidden Assumptions

Successful strategy and innovation are about how fast you can become aware of your assumptions. When it comes to strategy and innovation, success depends on how fast you become aware of your assumptions and then modify them. But it’s a paradox:  You can’t see your most fundamental assumptions until you overcome them. This means that you…