Business Brainpower with the Human Touch

To succeed consistently in the marketplace, a company must have a clear and differentiated way of creating value for its customers, supported by well-defined capabilities—things it does exceptionally well that are central to its ability to perform, and hard to replicate. All this should be reflected in its portfolio of products and services. But those elements will only lead to sustainable success if the company has the right organizational design, one that enables it to execute its strategy.

No matter where your customers, employees, partners or channels are in the world, Bare Brilliance can improve the performance of your business by deploying a global next-generation training solution. All without the traditional costs associated with face-to-face training.

Don’t believe us? Watch a short video of a training session for one of our clients who trained their global team – all for a fraction of the cost associated with normal training.

The word “Presentation” for lack of a better term often called “PowerPoint” or “Slidedeck”has become synonomous with a period of long, boring information forced upon the audience by the Presenter.  But love it or hate presentations do play an integral part of communication from business to education and everything in between. If used properly a presentation can serve as the medium to externalize your story or idea.

Anyone who has ever used PowerPoint knows that they offer boring un-inviting templates that look like they were created a generation ago. And most of us at one time or another didn’t know any better and started with a default template, pasted loads of content and called it a Presentation.

After working five years as a regional director at a large health insurer in Oakland, Calif., Daniel Eddleman felt ready to move up the ladder. So he found a mentor within the company who agreed with Mr. Eddleman that his performance and leadership ability merited the promotion.

But he'd need to work on a few soft skills to clinch the job. "It can be a challenging environment to get noticed in because it's such a big organization," says Mr. Eddleman, who connected with a job coach who helped him identify and work on three weak areas—including the ability to self-assess, manage his emotions and brag.

What do employees really want from company leaders? The answer may surprise you — and, more important, may prompt you to change some of your practices.

“I don’t think the people who work for you want you to be an optimist anymore,” says GE CEO Jeff Immelt. “They want you to be realistic. They don’t want hollow promises, they want action: What’s your plan, and how are you going to solve problems?”

The hallmarks of what Immelt calls “positive leadership” are authenticity, transparent communication, a focus on the future, and the ability to solve problems and take action.

Meetings are often the bane of many a creative’s existence, especially those working for a big outfit. “Death by meeting” is a common complaint, the lament usually being one of frequency, length, or lack of productivity. Despite the many books written on the subject, meetings remain a sore spot for many. There may be a practical solution.

People say that business is all about relationships, but the truth is that business is really all about communication. Communication is key to virtually every aspect of business—from acquiring and retaining customers to improving employee engagement and performance. At the most fundamental level, business can’t happen without communication. This is even more true in the era of globalization. As geographic borders become porous and the world flattens, effective communication with customers, employees, partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders across the globe becomes essential to successfully running a company.

A simplistic approach to this issue (and one adopted by some less-progressive companies) is to assume that everyone will speak English, including all potential customers and employees. After all, English is the lingua franca of much of the world, and the language you happen to be reading this article in. Yet given the accelerating pace of globalization, and the rising influence of many non-English-speaking countries, the flaws in this thinking start to show.

Recent technology advances in mobile computing and augmented reality are blurring the boundaries between traditional and Internet retailing, enabling retailers to interact with consumers through multiple touch points and expose them to a rich blend of offline sensory information and online content. In the United States today, more than 50% of cell phone owners have smartphones, and more than 70% of these have used their devices for comparison shopping, a habit that is becoming increasingly common worldwide.

In the past, brick-and-mortar retail stores were unique in allowing consumers to touch and feel merchandise and provide instant gratification; Internet retailers, meanwhile, tried to woo shoppers with wide product selection, low prices and content such as product reviews and ratings. As the retailing industry evolves toward a seamless “omnichannel retailing” experience, the distinctions between physical and online will vanish, turning the world into a showroom without walls.

Forget spreadsheets, swot analysis and risk management, the latest topic on the business school agenda is happiness.

Those academics who research the topic prefer to classify it a bit differently, however. “Meaning” is the term used by Lee Newman, dean of innovation and behaviour at IE Business School in Spain. At Michigan Ross in the US, Jane Dutton, university professor of business administration and psychology, says it is about “human flourishing”. Christie Scollon at Singapore Management University describes it as “subjective wellbeing”.

But however they describe it, they all agree that happiness makes good business sense. Moreover, employers and policy makers need to consider the happiness factor if they are to promote strong economies and profitable companies.

When Jim Keenan, the social sales specialist, describes his work today, he’ll tell you that he’s “ushering salespeople from the old world into the social world” – the cold calling world to the Twitter world, the salespeople who call prospects incessantly to the salespeople who educate their prospects with relevant content. Keenan’s argument in the The Rise of Social Salespeople is that using social media to sell – increases profits.

But up until now, we’ve had no real data.  So sensing an opportunity, Keenan’s firm recently released a report on the impact of social media on quota attainment and the results were impressive.

Squeeze your employees, and you’ll pay the price. Seems obvious—but Ernst & Young has actual evidence. For its annual fraud report the firm surveyed 3,000 company board members, managers and their teams in 36 countries across the world, and found that employees feeling the double pinch of increased demands and fewer financial perks are alarmingly likely to respond by doing anything from fudging the numbers to bribing officials and clients.

Practically everyone, it seems, is feeling the pressure to grow their businesses and meet their targets in a tough economic climate, but at the same time, “the vast majority” of people reported that they’re not getting the bonuses, raises and other perks that they used to. Oddly enough, this is true not just in the sputtering engines of Western capitalism but also in hyper-competitive rapid-growth markets “where the battle for talent remains fierce.” In India, for instance, 43% of respondents were witnessing what E&Y delicately describes as “downward pressure on pay and remuneration.”

Co-workers are like family. Most of the time, you don’t get to choose them and there will inevitably be people around with whom you naturally clash.

However, at work, how well you relate with others and whether your co-workers like and respect you absolutely affects your ability to get things done.

Fortunately, there’s a new edition of the classic book People Styles at Work by Robert Bolton and Dorothy Grover Bolton that helps us understand the behavioural styles that determine how our co-workers think, make decisions, communicate, manage time and stress, and deal with conflict.

By understanding your own and the people style you’re dealing with, you can establish rapport with someone more easily, become more persuasive, and avoid miscommunication and the possibility of rubbing someone the wrong way.

Organisations remain disciplined in evaluating transactions – placing a premium on thorough analysis of potential risks and exposures. Forward-thinking corporates are recognising data as a strategic asset in the execution of their Capital Agenda and are leveraging it to strengthen their competitive advantage.

For organisations to compete successfully on analytics they need to drive a strategic approach which is applied right across the organisation — impacting how they invest, optimise, raise and preserve their capital.

Now that I’m not the CEO of Brazen Careerist, I don’t have to be the national cheerleader for Generation Y. I fantasized about this moment for years: the moment when I’d write the post titled, 10 Things I Hate about Generation Y.

But it’s hard to hate people you hang out with all the time, and the truth is, I’ve spent the last ten years being a Gen Xer surrounded by Gen Yers. The pinnacle, I thought, was me spending my days fighting with Ryan Healy about work. But in fact, it turns out the pinnacle of my education on Gen Y is my arguments with Melissa about her peers that end in snippy impasse.

Sometimes, I think Gen Y is lame and she won’t admit to it.

Most executives take managing risk quite seriously, the better to avoid the kinds of crises that can destroy value, ruin reputations, and even bring a company down. Especially in the wake of the global financial crisis, many have strived to put in place more thorough risk-related processes and oversight structures in order to detect and correct fraud, safety breaches, operational errors, and overleveraging long before they become full-blown disasters.

Yet processes and oversight structures, albeit essential, are only part of the story. Some organizations have found that crises can continue to emerge when they neglect to manage the frontline attitudes and behaviors that are their first line of defense against risk. This so-called risk culture1 is the milieu within which the human decisions that govern the day-to-day activities of every organization are made; even decisions that are small and seemingly innocuous can be critical. Having a strong risk culture does not necessarily mean taking less risk. Companies with the most effective risk cultures might, in fact, take a lot of risk, acquiring new businesses, entering new markets, and investing in organic growth. Those with an ineffective risk culture might be taking too little.

The very term “mental illness” carries such a stigma that even acknowledging this headline out loud was a risk. The euphemistic or politically correct term for a mood or personality disorder might be “carries a diagnosis.” But any way you look at it, the issues of mental illness in the workplace are real and the number of people who are affected is great.

From depression, anxiety, ADHD and dyslexia to OCD and bipolar disorder—a great many of the individuals we work with – possibly even ourselves—are dealing with at least one of these issues, and due to “co-morbidity” – the conditions that tend to occur in pairs or multiples—there are many individuals dealing with more.