Why Bosses are Proudly Serving Shit Sandwiches to Their Teams Recently, three different senior managers I respect asked me where they could buy extra copies of my book, Sh*t Sandwich: Quick & Practical Success Lessons for Practically Anyone. All three were looking for the same thing: a success book their respective teams would read, […]
You Don’t Have Sales Managers; You’ve Got Deskers! Most dealerships I work with seem to suffer from too few managers. They don’t have enough managers to control the sales floor, monitor phone calls and other activities, oversee the basic Road-to-the-Sale, ensure the CRM is being used properly or even train their own sales teams. Why […]
The Solution to the Never-Ending Car Dealer Staffing Problem So much has been written about the decades-long issues of turnover and staffing in automotive retail that I continue to be amazed when I read headlines like this one from Automotive News recently: Dealership turnover squeezing profits – NADA study spotlights struggles in recruitment and retention How […]
If you’re like most dealers I speak with lately, you’re either looking to add a Business Development Center (aka BDC) or trying to find ways to make your current BDC more successful? If so, then there are just a few simple “must haves” that are truly non-negotiable if you’d like your BDC to succeed […]
(WARNING: Salty language ahead. Do not continue reading if you plan to complain about the choice of words used in this post – they were chosen with great care to evoke a very specific meaning. Originally published by The Manager on LinkedIn.) Nobody likes a know-it-all. Nobody. I’m not talking about the know-it-alls who actually […]
It seems that as a pro-capitalism, successful business leader that I am somehow partially to blame for what ails the protesters who’ve joined the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. I am the enemy. I am the bad guy. While I’ve tried desperately to comprehend both their demands and their end game, I have to […]
After nearly a year of studying the inner workings of successful automotive dealerships’ Internet sales efforts, David Kain from Kain Automotive and Steve Stauning from pladoogle.com have released their groundbreaking study showing the activities and actions that truly drive Internet sales success for today’s automotive dealers. Their conclusions are expected to shape the structure and […]
Today’s Leaders Are Tomorrow’s Followers For some reason I’ve run into too many business leaders lately who know less and less about how their businesses are being marketed on the Internet. From owners and CEOs to vice presidents and general managers, leaders (even good ones) are getting further detached from the realities of what […]
Keep Everyone Busy So You Can Kill Creativity In the current economic climate (one that we’ve dubbed The Great Necession), it seems that companies are so concerned about productivity that they’re forgetting about innovation and creativity. Whether we’re all trying to cover our asses as managers or whether we truly believe that micromanagement and piling […]
Don’t Bring It to Work – Breaking the Family Patterns That Limit Success, by Sylvia Lafair, PhD I absolutely love it when an expert in a non-business field brings their knowledge to the business world. Whether it’s a former all-star athlete turned successful businessman (ala Julius Erving), or a rehabbed musician turned stock trader (ala […]
Leadership Decision Making and The Law of Unintended Consequences Certainly you’ve heard the axioms “nothing happens in a vacuum” and “for every action there is a reaction” before. We’re pretty sure that every thinking adult not only understands these sayings, but also believes them to be true. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and […]
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 […]
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 […]
Circuit City – We Told You So… In what was probably the easiest call in the last ten years, we told you Circuit City was going to go all the way (read our November 12, 2008 post if you don’t believe us). Back then we said you shouldn’t “be fooled by their reorganization plans; Circuit […]
Great Leadership Blog Worthy of Special Mention – CatchYourLimit.com As our regular readers know, we produce four semi-regular Blogwatch series covering Time Management, Sales Management, Management Training and Leadership Development. In these series we attempt to help you cut through the clutter and discover great writing and great advice. While we think we do […]
Best of the Leadership Development Blogosphere We scoured the Leadership Development posts and articles for the past several weeks to find just those precious few that deserve your attention: Are Leaders Born Or Made? Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan studied the progress of 88000 managers who had been to leadership development training. The people […]
The Best of AskTheManager.com – 2008 One of our regular readers sent us a nice email last night wishing us, among other things, a Happy New Year. We know it wasn’t just a mass email sent to everyone in his address book because he requested we write this post today. Specifically, he asked us to […]
Leading in the New Millennium: Pay for (Lack of) Performance “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair Although Sinclair’s words were uttered in 1935, they ring especially true when applied to the leadership void we face today. While Sinclair, a […]
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 […]
Sharpening the Saw One of the greatest leadership lessons of all time, sharpen the saw, comes from the greatest leadership books of all time: Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. (To see our list of the Ten Best Leadership Books of All Time, follow this link.) The seventh of the seven habits […]