For most of us, 2015 has been one of those years where business leaders were continuously faced with new obstacles to progress. Tepid demand, a strengthening dollar (+13%), the first interest rate increase in 8 years, a slowdown in China’s growth rate (-30% to – 50%, depending on who you listen to), oil down (-30.5%), volatile stocks on the DOW which is down (-2.2%) for the first time since 2008, geopolitical turmoil, a decline in the manufacturing index (-14%), etc. etc. etc. 2015 should be a reality check for …Read More

It doesn’t matter what size your company is or what industry you are in. Every company is challenged with delivering a Known Good Product or Service  Let’s face it, companies are only about offering products and services. When working with clients, I often ask their definition of a Known Good Product and am usually surprised by their inability to give me a good answer. They often say that it is a function of cost or quality or customer satisfaction or profitability, but I typically never hear them say …Read More

In the previous Talent Management Blogs, we defined Talent Management as a set of integrated organizational HR processes designed to attract, develop, motivate, and retain productive, engaged employees. Hypothetically,we have created the job requirements, determined that we need someone to fill a role, recruited and hired a great new employee and provided the training required to be successful in their new role. So now your “new employee” isn’t so new (+6 months) and you want to ensure …Read More

You would think that in today’s world, effective supplier management programs are well defined and utilized throughout every company. The sad fact is that we have worked with middle market companies up to $500M in annual revenues who don’t have an effective supplier management program. The smaller the company, the worse it gets despite the fact that supplier management is one of the 7 critical business processes that every company must master in order to achieve long term success. Many organizations have …Read More

I was recently working with a division of a $1B company who was having problems with the introduction of a highly engineered product in a foreign country. They were struggling with manufacturing a complex component in a new product that was introducing a disruptive technology.

They recognized that this new product introduction was complex and that successfully introducing this product was the basis for their Market Effectiveness. They knew that that new product introduction programs typically generate their highest sales and profit margins in the fist 12 months after implementation. Disruptive product programs that are poorly implemented …Read More

In the previous Talent Management Blogs, we defined “Talent Management” as a set of integrated organizational HR processes designed to attract, develop, motivate, and retain productive, engaged employees. Thus far, we have reviewed how to develop a set of skills and competencies to drive Job Descriptions, hiring criteria and Performance Management and we determined how many employees with the right skills and competencies were needed to deliver your business goals.

The focus of this blog is to develop …Read More

We continue this series of blogs pertaining to global business practices and some of the lessons learned from decades of experience implementing global expansion strategies for Fortune 500 companies. Middle market enterprises desiring to start or continue their international and multinational expansions are well advised to reflect on some of these critical factors when creating their distribution strategy.

One of the early strategies to enter a foreign market is that of setting up foreign distribution. …Read More

Are Customers happy with the way you handle their complaints? Are you?

We all know that complaints handled well can open a portal to new opportunities. Back in 2008, customers were telling the company I worked for that we were not so good at handling customer complaints. None of us were surprised… we were frustrated ourselves with our mish-mash of process and tools and the impact of the poor quality …Read More

We begin this new series of blogs pertaining to global business practices and some of the lessons learned from decades of experience with implementing global expansion strategies for Fortune 500 companies. Middle market enterprises desiring to start or continue their international and multinational expansions are well advised to reflect on some of these critical factors.

First, we consider globalization a do or die strategy. Clearly Fortune 500 enterprises have demonstrated this fact by their …Read More

In the previous Talent Management Blogs, we defined “Talent Management” as a set of integrated organizational HR processes designed to attract, develop, motivate, and retain productive, engaged employees and we reviewed how to develop a set of skills and competencies to drive Job Descriptions, hiring criteria and Performance Management.

Wikipedia defines Workforce Planning as
“a continual process used to align the needs and priorities of the organization with those of its workforce to ensure it can meet its legislative, regulatory, service and production requirements and organizational objectives.”

In simple and direct terms… …Read More