Eight key properties for a strategic planning facilitator

Summary:
When preparing for your upcoming strategic planning session, be sure to hire an outside facilitator instead of using an internal person for this role. The reason to hire outside of your organization is so important is because an outsider has no affiliation with the company and will be in a better position to keep the [...]

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Out Of Sight; Out Of Mind; Out Of Business

Summary:
This article addresses those who don’t have a monthly contact process with your customer base, and gives four reasons why you should contact your customers every month. Monthly contacts with your customers should be the cornerstone of the way you do business. If your customers don’t regularly hear from you, you are gone from their [...]

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The Spreadsheet Versus Online Asset Management Software

Summary:
Business leaders continually strive for efficiency  in all aspects and processes of the organization. A business’ measure of efficiency is only as good as the combined efficiency of all of its assets, which typically is measured in terms of performance against purpose. Reigning in energy costs due to equipment use is determined by how each [...]

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How to Get Employees Excited About Your Business Vision

Summary:
Josh Spiro writes that if you want your employees to be committed to your business, you first need to examine what employee engagement is. Peter Stark, author of Engaged! How Leaders Build Organizations Where Employees Love to Come to Work describes employee engagement as a state in which, “employees are connected both at the head and [...]

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How to Keep Customers Smiling

Summary:
On his blog, QuickSprout, Neil Patel wrote about customer happiness and gave twelve tips on how to keep them smiling. Businesses that want to succeed should always strive for quality customer service, yet we constantly run into less than helpful people in our shopping experiences. Patel cites a survey by Harris Interactive, in which 88% [...]

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What Are the Benefits of Strategy Planning?

Summary:
The benefits of strategic planning are many, and is often the difference between businesses that succeed and businesses that fail. Benefits include:

identification of breakthrough strategies
a clearly defined road map that is supported by top management
allocation of resources on identified strategies
goals formed from relevant data with a common understanding
goals aligned throughout the organization

The area that many [...]

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Business Planning That Makes Sense For You

Summary:
Creating a business plan before you actually start up a business is a must, even for “solopreneurs” – those that want to earn a little extra cash on the side of their normal jobs. Yet all plans don’t need to be formal 30 page long documents. In fact, many business plans are only a one [...]

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Learning Management Software Providing Support To Elearning

Summary:
The number of people moving from traditional classroom settings to electronic learning is skyrocketing. In fact, a study by Ambient Insight Research estimates that the number of elearners will quadruple in next 4 years and that by 2014 an estimated 81 percent of post-secondary students in the USA will be taking some or all of [...]

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Strategic Management Systems Boost Results

I read an interesting blog by Bill Barberg recently that talked about using a strategic management system not for integration of IT as that can take the focus off of strategic issues, but instead using a strategic management system to engage various stakeholders to collaborate and communicate on the essential details for strategy execution.
Using the [...]

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Six Key Features of Online Debt Management Software

Summary:
Legislation changes and changes in communication preferences from land based telephones to mobile phones have caused debt collectors to change the way they collect debts. As litigation against debtors increases, debt collection agencies need appropriate software tools to identify accounts where a lawsuit is the best option to settle the debt.
This article seeks to identify [...]

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Three Vital Concepts of Strategic Management

Summary:
Strategic management is the process of developing and executing company strategies, and plays an vitally important role in business administration. This article by Eric Douglas highlights three concepts of strategic management that businesses should focus on. First, the business should have a clear understanding of available resources, both financial and human. Without the right amount [...]

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Why Excel falls short in executing Strategic Planning

Summary:
Using excel spreadsheets for strategic planning is a lot like using a sledgehammer for fixing a leaky faucet, as the blog at mystrategicplan.com points out. Excel sheets are great for many things, but what it can’t do for the strategic planning process is:

Excel won’t teach you the strategic planning process
Excel won’t show you how your [...]

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Why women make better bosses

Summary:
Who makes for a better boss, a woman or a man? Professor Khalid Aziz, CEO of leadership development consultants at the Aziz Corporation believes women make better bosses than men. He argues that women have less short-termist outlooks, are more holistic in their approaches, and are more reasonable.  Professor Aziz sites his top ten reasons [...]

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Top 5 network management investments

Summary:
With little room in the budget, businesses must be selective with which new products to choose. The need for improved efficiency is causing many businesses to turn their precious dollars to network management investments. Virtualization creates new sources and destinations for traffic and in order for IT departments to keep up with the increased demand [...]

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Strategic plan makes its way to the board

Summary:
The New Albany-Plain Local School District’s has created a draft of their strategic plan that a 35-member strategic-planning committee has been workingon since December 2009. All told, more than 130 people participated in the strategic planning process, which included the planning committee and 10 action teams that developed strategies for reaching the planning group’s objectives.
Highlighted [...]

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Why Management Is Broken And How To Fix It

Summary:
Managers in all industries can destroy millions of dollars in value at their companies within a short amount of time. . However, this author sites the following reasons for inadequate leadership:

Business Education- inexperienced professors focused on academic pursuits; failure to teach ethics/social responsibility; lack of practical experience opportunities for students
Progressive Education and Pragmatism - focuses on [...]

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5 prerequisites for conducting performance reviews

A significant portion of our lives revolve around work, which means that most of us are faced with some type of performance review every year. Samuel Culbert wrote a Wall Street Journal article that asserts everyone hates performance reviews and that they are “a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive [...]

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How to Conduct an External Strategic Management Audit

Summary:
Conducting a strategic management audit requires research, analysis, decision making, and implementation. It is important for businesses to conduct strategic management audits to fully understand the environments in which they operate. Changing trends, demographics, and customer likes and dislikes can change rapidly and if you aren’t closely watching external conditions, you can easily be left [...]

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Strategic Planning in Small Business, is There Such Thing?

Summary:
The vast majority of small business owners do strategic planning for two main reasons. First, the owner typically is so immersed in the day-to-day operations of the business that they simply don’t have the time to plan. Second, they often lack the skills to develop a solid strategic plan. Even large corporations have trouble developing [...]

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Why do so many of our projects fail?

Summary:
Dick Billows, PMP, GCA offers typical reasons projects fail . . . and talk about failing big with a 70% project failure rate! There are three roles that project management is dependent upon for success: the executives role, the project manager’s role, and the project team member’s role.
Each of these roles needs to be carried [...]

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Strategic Planning ? the reality behind the buzzwords

Summary:
Strategic planning should not be an act that occurs once a year, or once every three years. By checking in on your strategy in this way, it creates the need for larger business changes than would have been necessary if the strategy had been checked and adjusted more often. Large strategic changes are to be [...]

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The difference between strategic and financial planning

The difference between strategic and financial planning often gets confused when developing a strategic plan. Both are critical and both need to be managed. Financial planning often aids strategic planning simply because you must fund the planned initiatives. However, the fundamental difference between the two activities is in the emphasis of the activity. Strategic planning [...]

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Financial Management Software For Business

Summary:
Every business needs to monitor their finances if they plan on staying in business, from sole proprietorships to huge global conglomerates. The type of financial accounting system you select depends largely on the size and complexity of your business.
Small businesses might be able to operate with basic financial accounting features that manage general ledgers, accounts [...]

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Strategic Planning Process

Summary:
Strategic planning involves analyzing current and historic data and making informed decisions that are designed to grow or improve the organization in some form or another. The process itself adds much of the value due to the in-depth discussion and analysis, the focus of a decided upon path, and the increased commitment to goals or [...]

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Affordable vs. Cheap Membership Management Software

Summary:
When choosing membership management software there are some basic questions to ask before committing. This article offers suggested questions to ask potential vendors. For starters, what is the price? This is a good question to ask for obvious reasons, but be careful that the vendor doesn’t base the cost of the software on the amount [...]

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