Articles

Full Truth about Responsibility or It’s Always Up to You The management's key competence is responsibility for everything going on in a company – sounds bombastic and superfluous, but requires a very thoughtful approach.

New Opportunities in Business: Search, Find and Multiply I’d like to start discussing this topic with an episode from the Torah. When Moses led people of Israel to Canaan, before they stepped on the new land, he sent 12 spies that they would assess the place and the opportunities for conquering it. Coming back to Moses 40 days later, ten out of twelve spies “gave a bad report about the land they explored” and only two confirmed that this is the “land flowing with milk and honey, a very fertile land.” Without claiming the accuracy of my version of this biblical episode, I see interesting business connotations.

Constructive Critique: Delicate Adjustment One of the top manager’s important competences is being able to provide effective feedback or effective criticisms. Enabling the employees to put the fruit of their effort in perspective, exposing merits and demerits – what’s so difficult about it? In reality it turns out that very few can motivate and inspire while criticizing… In the meantime, wrong criticism brings directly opposite results: procrastination, sabotage, demotivation, etc. What is “effective feedback” and how it should be provided?

Value Dreamers! Love the Disgruntled! Any relationship between the boss and his subordinates is built upon the basic conflict which is very primitive by nature. Bringing this situation to absurdity it can assumed that the goal and aspiration of any employee is sitting at home or better in Bahamas with an exotic cocktail in hand, doing nothing and systematically getting decent sums of money to his or her account. At the same time the boss (again we bring our illustration to extremes for clarity) would like his employees to live in the office and work incessantly without even a lunch break – why not using special probes to feed personnel without their discontinuing the work? But this is not all! The employer dreams of the unselfish effort from his subordinates, besides their high work ethic and effectiveness, since he would not pay anything for their zeal and fervor.

The Knowledge We Choose or “What?” vs “How?”

What kind of knowledge should a manager possess to be able of helming a company? What skills of his would let the team achieve the set goals and become competitive in the long run? Before answering this question, I suggest that we should have a general look at the system of education and labor market we have in the present-day context.

The principle of organizing the sales department or the hard choice between “whom?” and “what”? One of the acute issues that has to be addressed by any executive is the right principle of organizing the sales department. As a top manager, coach and business consultant, I often face this challenge which is on the agenda of different companies, big and small, global and operating in local markets, with an authoritarian and democratic management style.