Black Friday
I’ve never quite understood the phenomenon.  People will wake up uncharacteristically early and sit outside in the cold and rain to wait for stores to open (again, uncharacteristically early) to shell out cash on so-called “great deals.”  Given, many of these sales and discounts are pretty steep, but that doesn’t necessarily justify the 4am rush. Particularly when people know ahead of time that they’ll get caught up in the experience and buy things they don’t need, purely because of the discount. From Facebook this morning, I even got myself a Kitchenaid stand mixer for 139 bucks! Apparently I am a sh

Holiday Traditions
Tomorrow is Turkey Day, so rather than talk shop I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my favorite holiday traditions.  First and foremost is the annual football game at the middle school.  Once a year, all of my high school buddies come together to brave th

Directions
How well can you follow directions?  Not necessarily instructions provided with your new desktop computer, but directions in general.  There are always those people who set off on their own, thinking they understand what’s going on and that they can figure things out on their own.  In a team environment (read: corporation) this can damage your reputation and destroy your bottom line. Even the CEO of a company needs to be able to follow directions, albeit half of the time he or she wrote those directions.  They key here is that the CEO needs to live up to the standard he or she has set for the rest of the company.  Failure to lead by example doom

Fulfilling Obligations
How able are you to live up to your commitments?  Do you “forget” important meetings?  Are you “in a meeting” when customers call with questions? Everyone, from time to time, bites off more than they can chew.  We commit to unreasonable deadlines or take on massive team projects solo.  Whatever the motivation, though, it is important to our brand to stick to our guns.  If you say you’ll do something, either do it, or ‘fess up early enough to get the help you need to complete it. If you fail to live up to the expectations you set for yourself, horrible things happen to your brand.  In fact, a failure to deliver on key objectives coul

Make it Meaningful – II
Last week, I had a client exclaim with excitement that they’d seen a 400% increase in their web traffic as a result of a recent advertising campaign.  On first blush, this is an exciting statistic indeed … until you dig into it. Over a period of 3 days, they had gone from 5 web site visits per day to 30.  Many times, coaches and consultants tell us we need to put our successes and accomplishments in an easily comparable form.  A Fortune 500 company doesn’t care if you increased sales on a line by $5,000.  If the entire line only sells $1,000 per year, though, this is a significant achievement.  Unfortunately, a percentage overinflate