Great advice from the SmartCompany agony aunt to a small business owner who lost a tender because his company was not big enough.

My take: Just be who you are. It is too hard to pretend otherwise.

If a client discriminates against you because of your size, do you think they would understand and value what you have to contribute anyway? What does that say about their primary …

Moral Intelligence - Enhancing business performance and leadership success.
By Dough Lennick and Fred Kiel PhD, ISBN 0 13 149050 8

Some highlights:

Moral intelligence – the mental capacity to determine how universal human principles should be applied to out values, goals and actions.

We are hardwired to be moral but often stray from the path.

Cultural relativism – everyone has their own morality based on their situation and culture.

Without a high degree …

Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the originator of TQM (Total Quality Management), put forth 14 points of organisation behaviour change towards better performance.

Stilgherrian’s post on being real on the web brought to mind Deming’s eighth point: Drive out fear.

Point 8: Fear is a barrier to improvement so drive out fear by encouraging effective two-way communication and other mechanisms that will enable everybody to be …

Glenn Kelman said on Guy Kawasaki’s blog on entrepreneurship:
“It’ll always be hard work. Most start-ups find an interesting problem to solve, then just keep working on it. At a recent awards ceremony, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tried to think of the secret to Microsoft’s success and could only come up with “hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, work.” This is an obvious cliche, but most entrepreneurs remain …

A friend told me about an appalling “service” perpetrated by one of our local big telcos today.

Imagine this: The day’s finally finished. You have just arrived home with the kids in tow. There’s dinner to sort out, the cat to feed, and the family to settle. Suddenly, there is a knock on the door. A strange man wants to be let in. He is from your friendly telephone …

A very funny and pointedly thought-provoking post by Dave on the ethics around the Bratz dolls for young girls.

The comments are definitely worth a read.

When I first encountered these dolls a few years ago I was quite disturbed by them. Now I am hardly a prude by a long shot (just ask my friends!), but these dolls do seem to …

The recent terrorist attacks in the UK made me think of my post on principles vs rules.

The individuals in each terrorist cell are driven by clear principles. They act on these principles the best way they know how, using whatever method or approach that works. Often these are ways most likely to succeed in the local environment because of their local knowledge, and their high adaptability unconstrained …

I hate this word. I loathe it. It makes me so mad whenever I hear it! (I first mentioned it in this post.)

It is used colloquially most often near the word “innovation” or “idea”. It is nasty, shallow and cheapens(!) everything into monetary terms. It is the epitome of the failure of capitalism to look after humanity in general. It is why many so-called “business innovation” magazines …

I saw a TV piece on the pet food contamination scandal in the US recently which affected many dogs and cats. It was interesting to note the initial confusion amongst consumers as the contamination affect many different brands across different price points and market positions. This is because like many other mass manufacture-based industries, the pet food sector sources its base products from relatively few manufacturers …

“When play comes first, learning comes naturally.” Playskool TV commercial.

Businesses cannot hope to begin to leverage the innate creativity and learning ability of their people if they continue to rigidly define work, training and R&D as separate, isolated silos.

If work feels like work most of the time, there is not enough play!