You can now download the January issue of Better Business Focus
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Better Business Focus: Expert Inspiration for a Better Business.
Better Business Focus is the essential key for business owners and managers. It achieves that by focusing on the way in which successful businesses compete and manage their organisations. It focuses on how people are recruited, coached and developed; on how marketing and selling is undertaken in professional markets as well as in markets with intense competition; on how technology and the Internet is reshaping the face of domestic and home business; and on how people are being equipped with new skills and techniques. In short, it offers expert inspiration for a better business.
Below is a selection of articles from this month’s issue, and we hope you enjoy the read!
- John Bancroft – 10 tips for engaging with decision makers in 2021: If you are finding that you need to overcome more barriers than ever to reach those all-elusive decision-makers, we trust that these tips will help you.
- Mitch Ditkoff – Team Leaders: Communicate your responsibilities to your team! If you are a Team Leader, one of the first things you will need to do (if you haven’t done so already) is let your team know the full scope of your roles and responsibilities. You may think they know, but it’s very likely that they don’t – at least not at the level of specificity that a high performing team requires.
- Lolly Daskal – If you want to be a better leader, you must do this: In today’s fast-paced, frantic and frenzied world, there’s one thing above all else that leaders must do if they want to improve their attention, performance, relationships and—most of all—stress levels. Simply put, the secret to being a better leader is to have the discipline of pausing.
- Justin Bariso – This 1-Word email from Apple CEO Tim Cook teaches a major lesson in leadership: With the death of Apple cofounder and visionary Steve Jobs back in 2011, many feared the company would begin a slow demise of its own.
- Nigel Collin – How to present on camera: top 5 tips: Presenting on camera is a vastly different skill than presenting from a stage or in a boardroom. If you don’t connect, you’ll disengage your audience and they’ll disengage from your message. Here are some proven pointers to help.
- Dr Lynda Shaw – Tips on building a resilent workforce: By Dr Lynda Shaw, neuroscientist, business psychologist and change specialist.
- Benjamin Ball – How to give your webinars more impact: If you are a panelist or a moderator on a webinar, you want to make it a success.
- Thom Dennis – Why diversity is the key to 2021: There is an increased appetite for real change following one of the most divisive and difficult years in decades. It has never been so important to get inclusion and diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, physical disability and social differences right. Thom Dennis, CEO at Serenity In Leadership, tells us ten reasons why diversity is so vital and may well be the key to healthier times in 2021.
- David Finkel – Hiking and building your bench during Covid-19: In the past we have talked a lot about how to find and hire great people for your business. And up until very recently, the hardest part of building out a talent bench was finding people who were actively looking for a new position. Now, due to the current economic situation, we have an extremely rare opportunity to find new talent that would have otherwise been unapproachable.
- Amy Vetter – Give yourself a break: It may sound like a paradox, but working remotely can actually make us more tethered to our jobs. This phenomenon, sometimes referred to as “remote work guilt,” is common. While you may think that being supremely devoted to your job, at the expense of everything else, is a sign of loyalty and determination, it’s only going to hurt you
- Bob Apollo – Why it’s time to focus on outcomes: Complex B2B buying journeys are inevitably complicated. Your customer’s decision process is rarely straightforward or linear. Multiple stakeholders are involved, often with widely different perspectives and priorities. Without strong internal project sponsorship, consensus is unlikely and without consensus, action is unlikely.
- Janet Sernack – Disrupt yourself, team and organisation: As we move into the beginning of a new year it is a time for harvesting new ideas from our feelings, thoughts, and learnings from last year’s conditions of extreme uncertainty and volatility. Whether you actively seek to disrupt yourself, your team, and your organisation to effect sustainable success in the new year, or not, we all need to face, adapt and learn from the range of challenging disruptive events that impacted us in the past 12 months.
- Urko Wood – The first thing every Innovation team should do: Until an organization establishes accurate, precise, and agreed-upon meanings for the key concepts of innovation, its innovation efforts will flounder.
- Michael Graber – The whole system is rigged against Innovation: Work in innovation for more than a decade you see familiar patterns. One of the most damning, yet predictable ones is relying on the core business units to commercialize innovations outside of their core.
- Mike Shipulski – A little uninterrupted work goes a long way: If your day doesn’t start with a list of things you want to get done, there’s little chance you’ll get them done. What if you spent thirty minutes to define what you want to get done and then spent an hour getting them done? In ninety minutes you’ll have made a significant dent in the most important work. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s bigger than big.
- Greg Satell – 4 things about innovation and creativity that we can still learn from Albert Einstein: When we think of Albert Einstein, we inevitably conjure up images of the icon rather than the man. We see Einstein with his wild hair and his tongue sticking out or Einstein as a playful old man, riding a bicycle. We remember his cheerful confidence and his easy comfort with his own genius. He wasn’t always that way.
- Braden Kelley – The revolutionary new way to create shared value for businesses, customers, and society [Interview]: I had the opportunity recently to interview fellow author Erich Joachimsthaler, the Founder and CEO of Vivaldi, one of the largest independent global strategy and business transformation firms, to talk with him about his new book The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society, to explore the important role that connections play in both business and innovation.
- Sunil Bali – Born to be wild…: Professor of Psychology, Ed Diener, says that “The aim of life is to die young as late as possible.”
- Tom Koulopoulos – This kind of sleep can be dangerous to your health: This bad habit may be increasing the risk of Alzheimers (and it’s not the amount of sleep you get)