Started a new job? First order of business is to listen, absorb and learn the culture, environment and players within. Depending on your placement within the organization the impact of your decisions and actions will vary and as such it is essential to educate yourself with the current state of affairs. Your experience is essential, but don’t assume that every …
Opportunities and new clients don’t come announced
Be yourself at all times, as you never know when a random encounter can develop into an opportunity. These opportunities could be personal or business related, but they often workout when least expected from random meetings and very casual conversations. Treat all those around you fairly, be positive and optimistic and keep living your life centered around who and what …
All teams need business sensibility and awareness
Whatever your functional area of expertise is you need to be aware and involved in supporting what your organization is all about. Simply performing your operational functions in isolation is no longer enough to be a valuable contributor. Additionally, by staying away from the organizational core function you are limiting yourself in access, contributions and ultimately career advancement.
Build relationships and partnerships with vendors
Build relationships and partnerships with vendors providing services for your organization. No matter how large they may be they should never have an upper hand on your organization; you should work together towards a mutually beneficial relationship so don’t allow to be in a subservient position. Start your selection process by focusing on the needs of your organization, then research …
Focus on core competencies, outsource the rest
Perform a complete review of your operations and realign appropriately to ensure competitiveness, value and success. All business are doing things they shouldn’t and are not doing those which would bring them much needed value and quality. Focus your talent, people and effort into products and services you are good at, want to be better at and want to be …
Challenge everything: Long term incompetence is not a tradition
We can always do better, be better and so can our businesses and organizations. If you see areas that you believe can be improved (based on your knowledge and experience of course) please act on that. Processes, staffing, functional performance, operational needs, strategic alignment…they can all be improved and you can help – make them better today than they were …
Focus on your own success, not failures of others
No matter what one does they will always be faced with and challenged by those who don’t believe in them; have doubts or simply want to discourage them from leaving their comfort zone. If you know what your passion is, what you enjoy doing and are good at (quality is important) then all that is left is for you to …
Sustaining new year’s momentum
New year is here and for most of us today is our first day at work in 2011. As we woke up on January 1st (and sobered up) we were generally highly motivated to stick with the resolutions we made last week/year and believe that this year it will be different, that it will be better somehow. New year always …
Based on your resume, would you hire yourself?
Keeping one’s resume up to date is generally not at the top of “to do” lists since most of us don’t change our jobs frequently and as such our resumes quickly become outdated, inaccurate and forgotten. However, considering that we got our current jobs in part due to that old, outdated paper representation of ourselves we should definitely keep them …
Business & technology are partners, not competitors
Finding that perfect balance between business and technology can be a challenging process. Aligning them together where they are useful to one another, productive and most of all on the same page has proven to be the key to success for many organizations. It’s simple, in order to maximize return on technology investments, organizations must align IT decisions with strategic …