These articles illustrate why leadership matters. Few great businesses are built without inspirational leadership and we can all learn from the people in the news who are doing this well. What can you learn from the people described in the articles below?
All successful businesses do much the same things, but they are harder to do than you might think. I help run a business association where I live in Wadhurst, East Sussex, and we recently visited a small local nursery and tea rooms that has become very popular of late. These days, the mere mention of […]
Why is it that even when faced with obvious pressures to change many businesses find it so difficult to do? In January 2012 I wrote about ailing UK roadside restaurant chain Little Chef (more here…). It had so determinedly refused to change with the times, to evolve, that it shrank to be a pale imitation […]
If you are lucky your business will be in the right pace at the right time, but will it last? I don’t really understand why anyone eats Nutella, the jars of hazelnut and creme spread that are sold somewhere in the world every couple of seconds. I’m told it is delicious on bread but the […]
Great businesses can sustain great Returns On Capital. I have just searched my blog database (which you can find online here…) for “Tesco” and found 12 articles in the past few years, the latest in February 2014 (here…), which repeatedly decried Tesco’s mistaken focus on price rather than any other meaningful differentiation in this now […]
Investing time in team identity and alignment has a very high return in any business. I’m in the business review business: I can variously be said to lead, run, facilitate, orchestrate, curate, and simply manage business reviews, with management teams from businesses of all shapes and sizes, and at almost every stage of both development […]
All organisations need to adapt to changing times, but you can’t do it without strong and committed leadership. A big thank you to all of you who contacted me to say they had missed my blog recently, my regular musings on businesses in the news: the reason I haven’t posted a blog now for a […]
A business’ strategy should last longer than the tenure of the person in charge. It never ceases to surprise me just how many businesses don’t really have a very well thought out strategy. If they did it is unlikely that they would end up in quite the pickle that they so often find themselves in. […]
Don’t let your enthusiasm get the better of you in achieving your business dreams. The last time I wrote an article about Mulberry, the UK fashion brand famous for its costly handbags, I used the headline “Mulberry Trebles Profits”. That was in December 2012 when the share price was at £25 and the company didn’t […]
It’s amazing what great management can do with some deceptively simple-sounding strategic ideas. In the 1990’s, when digital printing came of age, traditional printers had a pretty bad time of it; the industry was transformed as technology moved the goal posts yet again. That shouldn’t have been too surprising though as there have been many […]
Sales folk go into battle every day to win business, but are they adequately prepared? If you are leading a business you could do a lot worse than read a translation of The Art of War by Sun Tzu. One of China’s Seven Military Classics it was written an awfully long time ago and it […]
