Tag Archives: ideas

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What is the Secret Ingredient to Effective Meetings?

There is probably nothing so maligned in the modern world as the business meeting. There are countless blogposts, articles, vlogs, and books written about how much time and money are wasted in business gatherings. Similarly, there is the same amount of effort detailing how to conduct effective meetings . . . yet the business world continues to make the same mistakes!

Meetings still lead the business world as one of the largest wastes of corporate time and stakeholder money!

However, effective meetings do serve a crucial function in any organization. Without effective face to face time for leaders, the corporation would wither and die. It is in meetings that innovative ideas are born, visions are cast, fortunes are made, and empires are created.

A great example of an idea that was created out of a series of productive meetings is the modern day GPS.

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How to Prepare Yourself for Exponential Growth

In 1998 Google burst onto the Internet scene and went from $0 market cap to $1 billion in 8 years. This was unheard of growth! A typical Fortune 500 company takes 20 years to achieve that same $1 billion mark.

However, since 1998, the time to grow from $0 to $1 billion market cap has steadily decreased. Facebook did it in five years, Tesla in four years, Uber in two years and Snapchat and Oculus Rift did it in just under two years!

Exponential Growth

According to the book Exponential Organization (by Salim Ismail, Michael Malone and Yuri van Geest) an “ExO” or Exponential Organization is an organization that display an exponential level of growth.

As you can imagine, any organization that undergoes exponential growth also undergoes exponential change. This change can easily destroy the organization completely or severely impact its growth unless it is handled correctly.

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How to Use Active Reading to Improve Your Business

If a business leader wants to remain relevant in today’s dynamic marketplace they must always be learning.  One of the best ways to learn and increase your knowledge is by reading.

Active reading, where you highlight important information and take notes on what is being read, is even one step better! Putting the highlighted passages and notes into a format that can be shared with others or reviewed at another time kicks learning up to a whole new level!

I have always been a voracious reader but I lacked the discipline required to go back to the books and pull out the highlights and notes. Because of that lack of discipline, I often spent many unnecessary hours searching through volumes of books for something I had read that I needed for my business.

Then Amazon changed everything . . .

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Are You Guilty of a Semmelweis Reflex?

Ignaz Semmelweis was a physician in Hungary in the late 1840s who worked in the maternity ward of a hospital. The mortality rate for women giving birth in his hospital at that time varied from 5% to 30% depending on the ward they were in. He was bothered by this high mortality rate and also by the significant difference in mortality rates between wards. He decided to do some research to uncover the underlying issue and, to make a long story short, he discovered that it was primarily due to the lack of physician hygiene.

Essentially, when midwives were delivering the babies in a ward, the mortality rate of the mothers was low because the midwives were relatively clean. When doctors were delivering the babies in a ward, the mortality rates of the mothers was high because the doctors did not disinfect their hands between deliveries and quite often came straight from the dissecting room where they had been practicing on corpses.

Semmelweis determined the deaths could be reduced significantly just by having the doctors, interns and midwives disinfect their hands before beginning each procedure.