12 Customer Dos and Donts

The Surprising Secret to Time Management

Many time management systems encourage you to waste time. Here’s a simple way to spend time more wisely.

9 Ways to Build Customer Trust

No one is going to buy from a person they don’t trust. Here’s how to build a better client relationships.

Customers don’t buy from people they don’t trust. Unfortunately, most sales gurus (including some that are quite famous) define selling as “convincing,” “persuading,” and “winning”–presumably with the customer being the convinced, persuaded loser.

No wonder so many people put up a barrier the minute somebody tries to sell them something!

Why A Little Pessimism Is a Good Thing

Many people put themselves into one of two camps: optimists or pessimists, people who tend to approach the world in either a consistently upbeat or a mostly skeptical manner. But researchers are now looking at the ways people mix and match their approaches, calling this “strategic optimism and pessimism.”

Can pessimism ever be a good thing?

Being Wrong Versus Being Confused

Which is worse? Being wrong or being confused?

Let’s start with some definitions. To make a wrong decision means you were mistaken and erroneous. Your decision was incorrect for the problem to be solved or opportunity that could have been realized. (There is also an immoral, unethical, and illegal connotation; but that is a different variation of a poor choice. To be confused means you are baffled, bewildered, and perplexed. You cannot be positioned to make a correct decision because your thinking is muddled and clouded.

Embracing analytics can resolve both conditions.

Are All of Your Customers Profitable to You?

It is no longer sufficient for an organization to be lean, agile and efficient. Its entire supply chain must also perform as the company itself does. If some of its trading-partner suppliers and customers are excessively high-maintenance, those suppliers and customers erode profit margins. Who are these troublesome suppliers and customers, and how much do they drag down profit margins? More importantly, once these questions are answered, what corrective actions should managers and employees take?

The ABCs of Enterprise Analytics

“Enterprise analytics” is a widely used term these days. As often happens, though—it’s being used in different ways, by different groups, for different reasons. Enterprise analytics can refer to any or all of these three concepts:

1. Access to analytics capability (so users throughout the enterprise can perform their own local analytics)
2. Access to enterprise-level analytics (so some users can see reports or dashboards that incorporate data from the whole enterprise)
3. Analytics platforms that can function at an enterprise level (working with multiple data sources and formats)

Consultants, business writers, software companies, and IT execs may all be using the term enterprise analytics to meet their own communication needs—so conversations can get a little complicated, and research can be somewhat confusing.

8 Rules For Creating A Passionate Work Culture

Several years ago I was in the Thomson Building in Toronto. I went down the hall to the small kitchen to get myself a cup of coffee. Ken Thomson was there, making himself some instant soup. At the time, he was the ninth-richest man in the world, worth approximately $19.6 billion. Enough, certainly, to afford a nice lunch. I looked at the soup he was stirring. “It suits me just fine,” he said, smiling.

Thomson understood value. Neighbors reported seeing him leave his local grocery store with jumbo packages of tissues that were on sale. He bought off-the-rack suits and had his old shoes resoled. Yet he had no difficulty paying almost $76 million for a painting (for Peter Paul Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents, in 2002). He sought value, whether it was in business, art, or groceries.

One More Reason to Hit the Gym: You’ll Make More Money at Work

We don’t need a study to tell us that working out is good for us. But showing us that regular exercise is linked to higher salaries is a different matter.

In a new study published in the June issue of the Journal of Labor Research, researchers have found that employees who regularly exercise earn 9% more than their lazier counterparts.

What is it about exercise that will garner you the big bucks?