When thinking about an organization, many people think of a hierarchical, “org chart” view—a visual view that is top down or bottom up. Often, that picture of an organization has the leader at the top, with the management layers underneath. But does this traditional view of an organization tell us anything about the factors driving quality, customer loyalty, employee [ Read More ]
Gary Grefer, President and CEO of Atlantic Foods Corp., had just successfully reinvented his company. After losing a large account that represented the majority of the company’s business, Gary had led the company during its quick and successful turnaround. “With the help of Aileron, we redefined the company, we recreated the culture, and we restructured the organization. We went [ Read More ]
It’s hard to accomplish anything without a plan. Whether you’re coaching a football team, cooking Thanksgiving dinner, or running a small business, you need a strategic plan. A strategic plan looks at all the things your small business could do and narrows it down to the things it is actually good at doing. A strategic plan also helps business [ Read More ]
An ESOP, or an employee stock ownership plan, is a retirement program that allows participating individuals to acquire ownership interest in their employer’s organization. ESOPs are most commonly used by business owners to transition a business (if they are departing or want to move ownership away from a concentrated group of owners), as a benefit to employees. There is [ Read More ]
If you’re growing your business, and customers are happy, just how much does employee engagement matter? “To ignore employee engagement is to ignore one of the fundamental ways that you grow businesses—which is through people and relationships,” says Chris Powell, CEO of Talmetrix, a software company that facilitates, measures and helps improve employee engagement. Chris has spent more than [ Read More ]
Strategic planning has gotten a bad rap with some business owners. You value flexibility and freedom so much you are concerned that a strategic plan will constrain you, clip your wings, strip away your entrepreneurial spirit, and ability to act. The notion of committing to a plan smacks of a bureaucracy you want to avoid. But, the truth is [ Read More ]
Beatles lead guitarist George Harrison once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” His point is, obviously, that if you don’t have a vision of where you want to be, there’s no right or wrong next step. When you think about strategic planning, the same idea applies: If you don’t have a [ Read More ]
Years ago, a “friend” who thought he was a mechanic, as did I, offered to improve my car’s performance. He removed parts of the engine, fiddled around with them, and reassembled them. When he finished, I saw some of the engine parts on the ground next to the car. He said that they were not needed and did not [ Read More ]
New news? Recently, some of the top newspapers are covering the topic of “performance reviews” and how they are becoming extinct as science was recently released that shows they actually cause a decline in employee morale. Is the science cutting edge or just catching up to what Deming has been teaching us since the 1970’s? Ratings and quantitative metrics [ Read More ]
During my years of consulting with family-owned businesses, I have encountered a number of mistakes made by the older generation when they have tried to transition their company to the next generation. During the transition, they were not aware of making any mistakes, only to find out in later years they had wished things were done differently. In consulting [ Read More ]
