ENCORE! 2.5 INSIGHTS

Ways to Overcome Small Business Failure  and Thrive in Hard Times Failures in business are inevitable as an entrepreneur. Add to that reality, an event, a crisis like Coronavirus, and failure seems much more likely.  You can even rationalize a certain acceptance that your business was overcome by things you could not control.  Well that may be the natural gravitational pull of the defeated mind, but it does not have to be that way.  Entrepreneurs don’t give up easily, and certainly not without a fight.  Here’s how to overcome the typical turning points in business survival… Coronavirus or not. A fundamental part of overcoming business failure is rooted in the mindset you have. It begins with a flexible and positive attitude and a willingness to change. Winston Churchill stressed this vital factor, saying, “ To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”  Failure is a part of life, and that includes business failures caused by natural disasters and pandemic

Who said love and business don’t go together? Find out just where you’re making a serious misstep. Today’s post is by Steve Farber, author of Love is Just Damn Good Business ( CLICK HERE to get your copy). At a 2009 conference in Dubai, I was making the case that love is more than a touchy-feely emotion but actually a profitable leadership and management tool that results in good business. Following my keynote, a healthy (yet borderline contentious) debate broke out among the participants. As the discussion developed, two familiar factions emerged. One essentially said that I was selling them a bunch of American nonsense. “Leadership is not about love,” they said, “it’s about fear.” The other, primarily younger, faction was pointing to the first and saying, “See what we have to deal with around here?” Ten years ago, this type of debate was fairly common among my clients. The leaders in Dubai expressed their views more openly and passionately than in some other coun

Guest Article By Jamil Zaki — Professor of Psychology, Stanford University; author of “The War for Kindness:  Building Empathy in a Fractured World _________________________________________ I know it feels impossible, but try to think back to the ancient past… sometime in 2019, before you heard about the coronavirus.  Back then, how would you have predicted people would respond to a sudden global pandemic? You might have imagined a scene from the movies “Contagion” or “Panic in the Streets” — mobs looting pharmacies, neighbors ruthlessly turning on one another. In truth, some people have brawled over scare items like toilet paper, but many more have done the opposite.  Covid-19 has sparked a global epidemic of kindness.  Even while forced apart physically, countless people have found ways to help and connect with one another:  delivery of groceries to quarantined neighbors, engaging in distant socializing with lonely older adults, creating popup donation campaigns

Those of us lucky enough to be able to work from home during the COVID-19 crisis are getting a crash course in how we can come together to do our jobs while remaining physically distant. The experience is giving us a glimpse of the work life of the future, which may be one of the more positive developments to emerge from today’s trauma. On a videoconference while sheltering in place, we can no longer pretend that there are sharp boundaries between home and work.  Kids, pets, impossibly messy or neat rooms, and other clues emerge in the margins of our computer screens. Managers are now seeing their employees with a fullness  not necessary completeness, they’ve never before imagined or now experienced.  Employees are seeing their bosses in casual attire, sometimes too casual, in makeshift office environs such as the dinning room table and living rooms. This new visibility will change the way we manage, lead and accept management from our superiors.  This is not the occasi

While the rest of the economy is tanking from the crippling impact of Coronavirus, business at the biggest technology companies is holding steady — even thriving.   With people told to work from home and stay away from others, the pandemic has deepened reliance on services from the technology industry’s most prominent companies while accelerating trends that were already benefiting them. Increase in demand for cloud computing platforms For companies managing their internet infrastructures, making adjustments to computing needs on the fly is expensive and complicated. Cloud computing makes it easier. Companies were already dumping their own data centers to rent computing from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. That shift is likely to speed up as millions of employees are forced to work from home, putting a strain on corporate technology infrastructures.  Increasing usage of remote and collaboration tools Microsoft has aggressively pushed its new business messaging and c

Understanding and applying the best practices from management theories can help a leader be more effective in guiding their team to success. Many of these theories gave rise to the leadership approaches commonly used to guide and grow organizations today, and you can choose from among them to identify the strategies that will work best for you and your team.  Understanding and applying management theories takes practice and possibly some trial and error. In this article, we explain the most common management theories and share some tips for how you can apply them in the workplace. What are management theories? Management theories are a collection of ideas that recommend general rules for how to manage an organization or business. Management theories address how supervisors implement strategies to accomplish organizational goals and how they motivate employees to perform at their highest ability.  Typically, leaders apply concepts from different management theori