Every leader eventually finds they have a toxic executive team member who behaves poorly, spreads discontent, or otherwise goes off track and holds the core leadership team, and the organization, hostage indefinitely.  As the leader, it is up to you to do something, but you avoid confronting the offender perhaps because you are averse to … Continue reading How to get a rogue team member back on board without drama or disruption →

Compusearch had always been an innovative company but operations needed to mature. Here’s the story behind how the management team, working with The Carlyle Group and IntelliVen, got clear, aligned, and grew to be sold for ~4X invested capital in 5 years.

Posted 6/10/2012, Updated 9/19/2019 Most acquisitions and alliances severely underperform relative to expectations set at the time of their inception.  No matter how great they look on paper, it is always a lot harder to make things come out anywhere near where they were meant to be than it seemed at the start.  Fortunately, based … Continue reading How to increase the odds of success with a strategic acquisition or alliance →

What To Do Between Your Exit and Next Position We wrote a post about how to make a graceful exit (especially when it’s involuntary) that explored what steps to take when leaving your position. This post is the follow-up that dives into how to identify, assess, and consolidate lessons learned to find the right next … Continue reading Transition Plan for CEOs →

Time Management for Leaders and Aspiring Leaders After reviewing the draft news release announcing my latest promotion (many years back) and offering her congratulations, our press agent exclaimed with some dismay that: “…now you’ll have even LESS time than ever!” I remember remarking smartly in reply that she was wrong, and that I still had … Continue reading How Top CEOs Manage Their Time →

Success favors the prepared! When the stakes are high, there is no substitute for getting so ready that your odds of success go way up, even if what was planned never happens.

Organizations almost always progress through five more-or-less well-defined evolutionary growth stages: Concept Startup Credible Sustainable Mature. The Five Stages of Organization The five stages of organization are defined by key characteristics, operating agenda, economics, and key concerns as summarized below. Concept Stage A new organization starts out as an idea, or Concept. A bona fide … Continue reading Five Stages of Organization Evolution and Key Characteristics and Concerns at Each Stage →

The purpose of a business is to solve a problem for a customer…which begs this question: WHAT solution does your organization provide to WHO and WHY do they pay for it? A way to think about it is that there are three dimensions to any business: WHAT, WHO, and WHY or in terms of Market … Continue reading Get Clear →

Strategic Leadership is to change your organization the way you want. You don’t just want change, though, because change means different, not necessarily better. We could say develop, which implies better, but towards what end? More specifically we want to improve but in what ways? What we want is to improve how well we do what we do, … Continue reading Change Alone is Not Enough →

Any organization is more likely to reach its potential to perform and grow when its leaders are clear about their organization today, where it is headed next and why, and when they know how it will get there. Strategic Leadership: Manage to Lead Using the Seven Truths introduces a straightforward yet rigorous way to describe and assess any organization as it exists and as its … Continue reading Your Case is the Course →