Leadership Archives – Page 10 of 14

18 Jan 2011

Zap! Make an Improvement

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:48:16-06:00January 18th, 2011|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership|

I just remembered something I read in "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh.

At Zappos they asked every employee to make an improvement to the business every day. The cumulative impact is huge.

If you have 10 employees and every employee makes an improvement to the business every day for a year (say 200 working days), that is 2000 improvements.

This illustrates the power of a group of empowered and motivated people all working towards a common objective; leverage.

What improvement are you making today? Tomorrow?

12 Jan 2011

Sterile Environments Are Depressing

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:48:31-06:00January 12th, 2011|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership|

Husbands can now rejoice, there is a scientific explanation for what men have subconsciously understood for years, too much housework sucks.

Apparently our obsession for clean and sterile environments is depressing us. An article I recently read in The Metro said that we are now making our world so clean and sterile that our bodies are being robbed of the multitudes of benign bacteria and germs to fight on a regular basis. This is causing us to become both weaker and in many cases our immune systems actually start attacking our own bodies leading to things like increases in […]

11 Jan 2011

Managing Projects by Outcome

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:48:35-06:00January 11th, 2011|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership, Software Development|

If you have used most popular project management software tools (Microsoft Project, etc.) you notice they encourage two things:

Schedule (time-line),
Tasks (and milestones) scheduled on a time-line.

One major issue with time-line based project planning is that the project plan is usually out of date by the end of the first week. Nothing ever goes according to plan so you either spend lot of time changing the plan, or just use the time line as a rough guide; not ideal.

Another common approach is to list all the things that need to get done (tasks or to do's) in a big list and […]

27 Dec 2010

Business Retrospective – Finding The Bright Spots

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-04T14:38:19-06:00December 27th, 2010|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership|

As humans we tend to focus on negative things more than positive. After projects that don’t go well we have post-mortems to discover all the things that went poorly and try to fix them for next time. After submitting a sales proposal and not winning the business, we have a review to look at why we didn’t win.

As business owners we need to step beyond this tendency and look more at what is working.

This mean looking at projects that went well and looking at the things that you did right; so you can do more of it and have more successful […]

10 Dec 2010

Measuring Awesome

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:49:13-06:00December 10th, 2010|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership|

If you want to deliver awesome (services and products) to your clients, how do you measure awesome?

Ask your clients.

(They are the ones who need to feel you deliver awesome.)

16 Nov 2010

When The Student Becomes the Master

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:49:50-06:00November 16th, 2010|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership, Mindset and Motivation|

The Manager

A funny thing often happens when you first become a manager (leader). You think that you became a manager because you had all of the answers or that being a manager requires knowing all.

After you settle into the role and if you have the right mindset, you realize that your job as a manager/leader is to find people who are smarter than you and help them produce at peak levels; essentially you are there to coach and remove roadblocks. You cannot truly be a great manager until you put your ego aside and realize that you become worth more […]

12 Nov 2010

Strategy – Don’t Forget Your Business

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:50:00-06:00November 12th, 2010|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Leadership|

There is a lot of confusion over some rather simple concepts in business. They stem from the following:

Working on the business,
Working in the business,
Focusing on your business strategy, and
Keeping your customers happy and finding new ones.

This all stems from one major problem with how many entrepreneurs think about business.

Your goal as an entrepreneur is to build a business (first and foremost) that can then build and deliver great products and services to your customers, thereby making more money than you are spending (profit).

What many entrepreneurs do is build the product or service as the main focus and deal with the […]

5 Oct 2010

Doesn’t Anyone Else Hear It?

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:51:02-06:00October 5th, 2010|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership|

I was at the local Tim Horton's to pick up my lunch today. They have those bread toasters with the conveyor belts. Over the last 2 months, the toaster has started screeching, progressively getting louder and louder every time I visit.

I can only take about 5 minutes in that place. I can't imagine meeting someone for coffee and trying to listen to the person attentively.

A while back, I asked an employee there if the noise bothered him. He told me you get used to it after a while. Kind of like that frog in hot water experiment I guess. (Come to […]

30 Aug 2010

Old Habits Are Hard to Break

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:51:48-06:00August 30th, 2010|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership, Mindset and Motivation|

I was doing some more reading on the train this evening. We all know old habits die hard but we try to change them all the same.

This approach is totally wrong.

Other than intentionally damaging your brain (which I strongly recommend against) it is impossible to actively rewire or remove an existing memory map once it has been firmly established. The more you think about a bad habit, the more it becomes entrenched; not less.

Yet well intentioned people try to change themselves and others using the brute force method all the time, even though it almost never works. You just end up getting […]

28 Jul 2010

How Much Is Your Business Really Making?

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T11:52:25-06:00July 28th, 2010|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Leadership|

Profits = Income – expenses

Profit margin is the percentage of profit over income. If you keep the ratio consistent, adding more revenue equals more profit. Relatively simple concept. (For simplicity let's keep income taxes out of the discussion.)

Yet it is interpreted very liberally and differently by small businesses.

The main reason is that most small business owners (practice owners) think of the business as an extension of their own personal accounts.

The formula becomes:

PersonalIncome = Profit = Everything left over is mine

Essentially, they exclude their own income from the business from the expenses and this inflates the profit margin.

I think this is a […]