READ STEVE'S BLOG POSTS
Connecting With Customers
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…
Email and Texting: The Illusion of Efficiency
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.…
How to Get People to Ask Questions
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…
4 Ways to Counteract Corporate Silos
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,…
Learning from Start-ups: Speed Does Not Kill
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…
Leadership Imperative: Learning How to Use The 5 Principles of Engagement
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…
Hot Dogs Coming Up at Burger King!
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…
Volkswagen– What Might Have Caused the Emissions Scandal?
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,…
The Value of Hot Buttons
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…
Stop the Meetings Madness!
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…