Accounting systems are designed to accurately report how a company did financially as a whole, using generally accepted accounting principles to make comparisons easier from company to company. Such systems are often totally misleading when it comes to accurately describing which areas of the company are providing the positive financial results.
One restaurant chain learned this lesson to...
A good way to narrow your search for allies is to consider the combinations of allies who could be most effective in working with the irresistible forces facing your enterprise.
Who are the allies that will make you and your enterprise most effective in working with the irresistible forces?
To answer this question, you need to start with a perspective on the whole range of...
"The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much;
if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little." --Mark Twain
Overoptimism stemming from a sense of certainty about succeeding with the right steps can stall an enterprise by keeping it from flexibly addressing issues as they arise.
Simply choosing a new direction for your...
If you are a leader in your enterprise (whether formally by job or informally by credibility), you have an opportunity to ask questions that can expose the weaknesses of internally dominated thinking. The best questions are those that expose the lack of external testing of your organization's thinking.
Those in your company to whom you pose such questions will soon realize that you'll...
When a puzzled school administrator called Mark Adamson's mother with a question about young Mark's views, his mother forthrightly replied, "Don't worry about him. Let him make up his own mind."
Mr. Adamson didn't have as much confidence as his mother did in his abilities to choose. As an adult, he described himself this way: "I never grasped concepts easily and I was, and still am today,...
How can you become good at finding allies? If you haven't been seeking allies much, you may be wondering how you can possibly become good at it.
You'll find it helpful to start looking at groups with which you already have well-established relations. These organizations will include your existing partners, customers, distributors, suppliers, and employees. Each can be turned into an ally...
Chances are that perfect allies for you are also out there looking for allies and have not considered you. The main reason that your two organizations are not currently allies is that you have no current business relationship.
How can you make contact with potential allies?
Increasingly, individuals and organizations are springing up who specialize in helping you find allies. A...
Organizations provide many reasons why they prefer to rely on their own people. These concerns include:
-The frequent rate of failure among joint ventures
-The difficulty of getting a high priority for resources needed from allies
-The time spent working with allies
-The effort it takes to attract allies, often unsuccessfully
-Disagreements with allies over future directions...
When sales falter in a region, the sales force may want to maintain its independence from interference and contain the problem by creating a solution using only its own people, perhaps by putting more salespeople into the field. This seems like a logical answer when no one knows the cause of the problem for sure.
Let's look at an example of when such an approach can be flawed. For...
People love to shout, "We're Number One." It doesn't take much to trigger such a shout. We've all done it.
One of the primary causes of being overly independent is a sense of confidence that as a successful enterprise "our people" are better than anyone else's people. That feeling relates to a common psychological problem. Most people see themselves as superior to the vast mass of humanity...
