Excerpt: Great leaders recognize that tough times create a rare opportunity to make dramatic improvements. They see that calamity can crystallize thinking and temporarily paralyze the forces which prevented change in the past. They understand that urgency and stress are limited commodities which need to be channeled into productive action, not squandered on panic and indecision. They know that short term corrections can support long term goals.

Excerpt: As a business leader, it’s your job to make other people in your organization smarter.  If you really want to unleash their discretionary energy and creativity you must create an environment in which employees have confidence in their own good judgment and the freedom to exercise it.  Convincing everyone else of your own brilliance may feel good but it’s a sure fire way to have a deserted parking lot at five o’clock.   

A management style that emphasizes problem solving on its own may find itself fixing the same problem over and over.  The goal is for your corporate culture to stress learning, search for root causes, avoid blame, and generate long-term solutions.  Move toward the learning model of organizational development to foster better management of your human resources.

With most distribution channels in a storm of change right now, managers naturally brace themselves, batten down the hatches, and react defensively with cost-saving measures and day-to-day operational controls. This article is about the direction of the tide instead of the size of the waves: Executives need to manage the longer-term cycle by reacting early and offensively to gain true competitive advantage.

Does your company really need to be "world class," or just incrementally better than every other competitor in the market?  Quite frankly, many companies will benefit far more from a strategy to "just suck less" than from any bold new vision.  We have christened this approach "negative" strategy, because it centers on removing the key sources of competitive weakness.

This article will explore the finer points of a typical succession plan and then delve into the less talked about points of an IRCG Succession Plan. Both components are necessary. At IRCG, we think both components are critical. Our second component, which describes what to let go of, is the critical piece that is often missing from an effective plan.