Successful leaders engage their colleagues, professional relationships and networks to drive innovation, growth, and extraordinary careers. Although engagement is a measure of an organization’s capacity to deliver and a leading indicator of financial performance, most companies ignore it or make it the job of the digital marketers. Certainly digital presents new, more effective ways to engage consumers and build brands. The engagement revolution, however, has much broader opportunities for business – accelerating decision-making, changing the dynamics of relationships, reinventing capabilities, and increasing profits.  Continue reading…

I watch the soap opera in Washington with great amazement and a bit of anxiety. Our leaders appear to be taking the country down a road filled with minefields. They speak with distain about Wall Street bankers who were about to drive the country off the cliff, yet fail to see that’s exactly where they could be heading – by creating waves of excessive spending, trillions in new debt, and political maneuvers designed to hide the truth from American citizens, voters, taxpayers.

Although candidate Obama argued for a bipartisan culture, his leadership has created something very different. In the past few weeks, the administration has heightened its attacks against its enemies: Continue reading…

Gen Y (aka the Millennials) will be invading the workforce for some time to come. I have personally discovered a few things that managers can do to successfully motivate and direct young professionals.

As businesses adapt to a changing economy, we expect the job market to remain extremely competitive. Gen Yers are feeling more pressure to get professional experience before officially entering the workforce. Roz Courtney confronted Gen Y/Millennial stereotypes in her post on September 10, daring the business world to involve us and reap the rewards. If you want to motivate and retain the best talent, perhaps it helps to understand what the Millennials need and how they think. Here are several rules of the game – Gen Y rules – which make good business sense. Continue reading…