Low Hanging Fruit and the Cost of Perfection Imagine a small airplane flying low over a crowd at a baseball game. The door of the plane opens and a smiling man appears with a large sack. He turns the sack over just as the plane flies over the bleachers and millions of dollars in […]
The Short Term or the Long Term I’m often asked by young managers whether a given decision should be made for the short-term or the long-term well-being of a company; and I always give the same answer: both. No matter what the issue is, the ultimate decision should weigh the pros, cons and consequences over […]
Coughlin’s Law: Bury the Dead People leave, let’s get over it. Gone are the days when a man arrives for work in the factory two days after his high school graduation and leaves forty years later with a gold watch. The American career path hasn’t included this scenario since before Lyndon Johnson took office. Over […]
Are You Venting or Just Making Excuses? A colleague recently posted a rant about the quality of the leads she was handling on an automotive industry social network. As a part of her diatribe on her most recent batch of Internet sales leads, she gave some great examples of just how bad the leads really […]
Last night the Pittsburgh Penguins defeated the Detroit Red Wings 2-1 in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals to win the coveted Stanley Cup. Both teams deserved to be there, both played well throughout the season, and – as evidenced by a Game 7 in a best-of-seven-series – both teams were evenly matched. Both […]
The Effect of Ego on Leadership At AskTheManager.com we’ve always held to the belief that you can learn more from bad leadership examples than you can from the good ones. It’s not really cynical to think this way; in fact, we believe it’s quite healthy. It’s like seeking out the silver lining. We’ve learned so […]
I don’t know about the best of times but these sure feel like the worst of them. It’s as close to Dickens’s London as I dare want to see us go. Dickens would have been hard pressed to pen an economic/social setting as ugly as the one we find ourselves in today. Eventually, we will […]
How Do You Deal With a New Boss? One of our regular readers – and someone who asked our advice very early on in the legacy that has become AskTheManager.com – AngelCakes from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan recently provided us with both an update on her management career and a new dilemma. When we first heard from […]
Sometimes You Have to be a Prick to Those Outside of Your Company I just received the March 2009 purchase report from one of our company’s 50+ vendors who provide such recaps. This particular vendor chose to name the file MyCompanyMarch.xls. By “MyCompanyMarch,” I mean he put the name of my company and […]
TheManager’s Leadership Book Review In what may become a regular feature of AskTheManager.com, we tackle the sometimes thankless task of reviewing the work of a published author. While you could argue that we’ve provided book reviews in the past with our Ten Best Leadership Books or our Ten Best Decision Making Books lists, this time […]
Too Much Technology… When working to help an underperforming business unit (in my real job) grow their revenues, I always discover instances where the unit has purchased some widget, gadget or other magic bullet designed to help them sell more. Although well-meaning, the manager who made this purchase generally believed against all his or her […]
It’s not a Recession, It’s a Necession Anyone bothering to pay attention to what’s happening with consumer spending in the current recession can note one trend: that is, even those consumers who are likely to be unaffected by the economic downturn are helping fuel the recession because they’ve gone into wallet lockdown. They’ve declared that […]
The Top 10 Resume Tips for Out-of-Work Leaders One of our loyal readers sent us an email this week that included their resume. As has likely happened to someone you know, this manager got caught up in the current economic turmoil and their position was eliminated. No notice. No severance. No clear prospects. Since it’s […]
Questions… we get Questions One of our readers, Anant, posted the following after reading our article from August 2008 titled The First Time Manager Dilemma, How Do You Gain Respect?: hi, i am facing a similar problem as mentioned above with one of my older employees, the only difference is that i am the […]
Why Does My Industry Refuse to Use Data? True story – of course, whenever anyone says or writes this it generally means that everything else they’ve ever told you is BS – anyway, true story: a highly compensated colleague wrote to a group of fellow highly compensated colleagues and asked “does anyone have any data […]
Brett “Cuatro” Favre and the Leadership Lesson of Humility When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. The best thing to do is admit it. We are certainly humble enough to admit it. At the beginning of the 2008 NFL season we predicted that the New York Jets would finish the season no better than 8-8… we were […]
2008: A Lesson in Recession and Leadership The axiom “sales cure all ills” rings more true today than ever. More than anything it teaches us an inarguable lesson: that is, we learn more about leadership in bad times than we do in good times. To prove this theory to yourself, imagine your company just 18 […]
Old Sayings are Often Gold Sayings Yes, that hackneyed phrase was as hard to type as it is to read, but I used it to illustrate a point: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; you do reap what you sow; and actions do speak louder than words. Is it just […]
Phil Savage, Cleveland Browns GM, Responds too Quickly While email etiquette in business has long been an important topic to the editors of AskTheManager.com, we’ve never pontificated on the importance of responding expeditiously. We’ve posted articles and opinions about email typos, email signatures, and we even ranked the worst email etiquette mistakes of all […]
It’s the Leadership, Stupid These past few months have seen the greatest turmoil in the worldwide credit and stock markets most of us have ever experienced. With depression-like drops in equities and recession-like layoffs, foreclosures and bankruptcies, nearly everyone has been too busy bailing water to blame the Captain… until now. While much of the […]