November 2010 – Meaford

Business Ethics and the Bottomline

November 24, 2010

Steve Tennant posted an interesting tweet yesterday, "SAP must pay $1.3B in TomorrowNow damages. Add $160M legal costs, that's a -14,700% ROI on your $10M acquisition.http://bit.ly/fjtF6p" His tweet got me thinking. For those of you who don't know the TomorrowNow story, they were founded by ex- PeopleSoft employees who left the organization to start a ...

Will my product sell?

November 23, 2010

I have been engaged in a email exchange with a young entrepreneur over the past couple of weeks. I met him at the C100 Accelerate TO event. Like any good CEO, he was trying to get exposure for his company by pitching it to senior execs and investors in attendance. I gave him some coaching ...

How are you hiring today?

November 19, 2010

How are you hiring talent today? Still using job boards? Stll using the traditional recruiter that is paid on success fees when you hire someone? How is that working for you? What about social media? Do you post status updates to your LinkedIn profile? Do you use Linked In job postings or ads? Do you ...

Being Competitively Different

November 12, 2010

On Monday morning, I attended a presentation by Professor Youngme Moon on how companies differentiate themselves from their competitors. Similar to her colleague, Clayton Christensen, Moon points out the danger of listening too much to your customers. Her point is that doing so will lead competitors to move towards a point where they look like ...

Why is the start-up world different? (or How to choose your advisors and employees)

November 10, 2010

I recently had coffee with a colleague who spent many years with large global consulting firms, specializing in large complex projects involving strategy, restructuring, governance and project management. He now has his own consulting firm which focuses on strategy, and primarily works with medium to large organizations. Over coffee, he wanted to pick my brain ...

How email damages your Personal Brand

November 6, 2010

I recently asked a favour of a business acquaintance to provide me a referral. We traded a few emails and he was very willing to go out of this way to help me. A few weeks later, having arrived at an outcome as a result of his referral, I sent him a quick note to ...

Change Management in SME

November 3, 2010

This is the last installment in my series on Change Management: Chapter 1: Leading Change – Part 1 of a Series Chapter 2: Leading Change – The Art of Change Management Chapter 3: Leading Change in a Perfect Storm Chapter 4: Leading Change – The Need for Speed Chapter 5: Leading Change – Putting it ...

Hiring Senior Talent – Part II

November 1, 2010

In my last post, I asked "are you ready to make your next senior hire?" and promised some tips on how to land great people. In the mid-1990's, PeopleSoft was on fire. Our stock price was rising, our culture was cool and our customers generally loved us. There was an "underdog being successful" feeling around ...

Month: November 2010