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Management

Four new takeaways from the Bastard

Snapshots of recent posts designed to save you time Knowledge and knowhow help us navigate a complex world. But information is useless if we don’t have time to consume it. Here’s the solution. Each quarter the Bastard will publish a summary of the last three or four blog posts designed for quick consumption. Short. To the point, and each with a new takeaway. Now you’re feeling industrious. 1. “Sti...
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21 News bites offer insight and direction

Once again, action precedes clarity What can one glean from a collection of seemingly unrelated news bites? Perhaps the better questions are: What’s important enough and what is motivating enough to influence our thoughts and future actions anyway? You can’t make sense of someone, or some thing, without effort and some engagement. You have to take action. Get it from Karl E. Weick, organizational...
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Get more out of your people to succeed

3 qualities to look for in your next hire Some believe that small business owners should constantly be looking for great employees—even when they’re not necessarily hiring. It’s a good point. We rely on our people, and we often sell our businesses on the very quality of our people. So when you think about building up your team or improving your bench you definitely want to hire the best candidate...
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What’s in a hit solution?

Create your own answer, but say it with feeling. Solution selling is a legitimate sales methodology. In this approach, rather than just pushing a product, the salesperson focuses on customer pain and then addresses the problem with his product or service offerings. From the salesperson’s perspective the tacit resolution is enough to constitute a “solution.” But not all customers buy to address a ...
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Stickiness trumps persistence

Align your organization for optimal success/resilience With so much pressure and so many forces at work on your business it’s easy to come unglued. Consider your customer; supply chain risk frequently represents their number one threat to revenue. How does your list compare? The better question is how do you keep it all together? The bond that eludes us To deal with such marketplace pressure, I...
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Four takeaways you can’t beat.

Snapshots from our best posts in recent months. Knowledge and know-how helps us navigate a complex world. But information is useless if we don’t have time to consume it. Here’s the solution. Each quarter you’ll find a summarization post (like this one) that features three or four of the best Bastard posts of the last period. Short, to the point, and with a new takeaway. Now you’re feeling industri...
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Try this basic listings grader. You will be surprised.

If they can’t find you, you won’t get the order. Many of us make the assumption that search services like Google will somehow append your address from your website or maybe your Hoovers or yellow page business listing. They do not. So every time someone does a search for you or your services, the track is set for hurdles. Your prospect finds you only because Google, Bing or Yahoo is bent on provid...
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Effective marketing made free and easy

Recognize and coddle all sources of word of mouth advertising Talk about taking something for granted! There’s nothing our businesses do that’s more undervalued and under-managed as word of mouth marketing. The reason? We don’t call it what it is. It gets diffused and lost like a vitamin at breakfast. Some companies try to measure it, but most do a poor job of it. I would doubt there’s any one in...
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Lessons from the state of the art

Inspiration from the making of Apple products. We can learn a lot from Apple. We would all do well to take a close look at how this company has been changing the game of making and delivering successful products to the marketplace over and over again. From idea to supply chain, no one’s doing it any better than Apple. I’d be asking myself, when was the last time WE acted on a creative idea? And, “...
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