Engaged Leadership Advisors

READ STEVE'S BLOG POSTS

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Connecting With Customers

May 26, 2016

The idea that a business needs to treat its customers well and understand their tastes and habits is so obvious it seems hardly worth stating. But oddly enough, many big companies fail in this area. Fundamentally, you’re in business to utilize the assets you have to generate a positive return on the investment made by…

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Email and Texting: The Illusion of Efficiency

May 20, 2016

On a recent flight back to New York from Chicago (two and a half hours) I turned my phone back on after we touched down and found that I had received eighty-seven email messages and five voicemails while I was in flight. I shudder to think what will happen on my next flight to Tokyo.…

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How to Get People to Ask Questions

May 16, 2016

One of the elements of a truly engaged workplace is the asking of questions. The fact is that most people are afraid to ask questions; whatever natural curiosity we had as children tends to get discouraged in most large organizations. Leaders assume following the status quo is the right way to go and are not…

Four Grain Storage Silos with Wide Base

4 Ways to Counteract Corporate Silos

April 27, 2016

People in different departments within companies are often in the habit of talking only among themselves instead of sharing information with other departments who need it. In fact, the lack of communication between the functional units of the company has become so common that most people accept it as the norm. Within a given organization,…

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Learning from Start-ups: Speed Does Not Kill

April 7, 2016

I’ve never met a leader who says to his team, “Let’s move slowly.” In fact, most companies think they are moving quickly – it’s just that in actuality they are not. This is why start-ups have such a great advantage. Once they make the decision to start their business they operate at full throttle almost…

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Leadership Imperative: Learning How to Use The 5 Principles of Engagement

April 4, 2016

If you were able to covertly drop into most companies, almost every day you could see executives who have no idea what is happening in their distribution centers, managers who had no idea they were losing customers until it was too late or global corporations who have fallen backward in their industry for no apparent…

Grilled Dogs from Burger King Made of Hundred Percent Beef

Hot Dogs Coming Up at Burger King!

February 16, 2016

Anyone who has ever barbecued knows that the three most common foods to cook on the grill are hamburgers, hot dogs and chicken. On February 10, Burger King announced it was adding flame broiled grilled hot dogs to its menu, which for many years has featured both hamburgers and chicken. So why did it take…

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Volkswagen– What Might Have Caused the Emissions Scandal?

January 12, 2016

During the writing of my upcoming book, a shocking story came out about Volkswagen. It was discovered that eleven million diesel vehicles sold in the United States and Europe contained a so-called software-enabled “defeat device,” which effectively lowered vehicle emissions for regulatory testing purposes. Basically it was a technique to deceive the regulatory agencies and their customers,…

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The Value of Hot Buttons

January 6, 2016

I had dinner recently with a friend who is the CEO of a large company. He was complaining to me about how difficult he found it to effect change. He described how his company was mired in processes that reinforced the silos within the organization, and perhaps more important, that no one appeared to clear…

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Stop the Meetings Madness!

December 22, 2015

It happened again just the other day. I was walking out of a conference room where we had been in a two-hour meeting. Nothing was resolved. I needed to speak with the CEO so I asked him if he would join me for a coffee. He said, “I really want to, but I’m in meetings…