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Sustainability – the new criteria
What is your position on SUSTAINABILITY? What community improvement activities is your company involved with? These are questions, among many others, that my team and I are responding to for a Request For Proposal (RFP) document for a sales training project with a large Australian Corporation. This is the first time we have been asked to respond to these questions in a formal manner and legitimise our position on ‘sustainability’. As sales people and as business owners, not only are we being asked to legitimise our product offering, our service standards, etc. we are now required to articulate our stand on ‘sustainability’.

Prepare for online success
When looking to run a successful business you must know how to plan for a productive day.

Other improvement activities Related Articles

Strategic Advice For Giving Feedback From Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach
One of the most critical activities of a coach, mentor, supervisor or anyone that oversees the work of others is to provide feedback to let them know, in a timely and ongoing way, how they are performing. People committed to continuous improvement welcome the opportunity to discuss their strengths and areas for improvement in their performance. Feedback must encourage self-reflection& raise self-awareness. Traditionally, formal feedback is planned as part of a performance appraisal and includes an assessment of how the person is progressing toward meeting his or her goals. Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach has some advice for those of you that do performance reviews and also offers ten (10) tips to help you achieve a productive and powerful feedback system with people you coach, mentor and/or supervise.

The Service Factor during Economic Turbulence
Improving and maintaining good customer service is not an exciting endeavor. It involves detailed study and steadfast execution rather than temporary brilliance or inspiration. Therefore, customer service improvement is fundamentally an effort of continuous improvement. You must develop a basic competency in process improvement to attain and sustain high levels of customer service. This means that it is absolutely critical during tough economic times that you don’t make the mistake of cutting resources that support service excellence in your attempt to control operational costs.

What You Do Best
Each time you reconsider your market positioning, be sure to include a few exercises to hone in on what you do best in your business. You want to tease out those activities that you absolutely love to do and those activities you are the very best at in the world.

Why Make Investments in Culture
Most CEOs are so busy solving critical problems they have no time to invest in improving the culture of their organization. This is a big mistake. The attached article explains the paradox and offers three key benefits to inventing in culture improvement activities.

Priorities and Schedules
Each of us on a daily or weekly basis somehow reduce our activities to a schedule. Some people use formal organizers or planners; others scribble notes on blank sheets of paper; and still others use obscure systems that defy description. But, in our own way, we each come up with a mental or literal "to do" list for the day. As we examine our list of activities each day, we generally prioritize them. That is, we determine which of these activities is the most important and which can wait till later if necessary.

Continuous Improvement
Firstly, this article asks the question ... "Is Continuous Improvement possible?" With a slight caveat ,the answer is 'yes'. It then sets out how you can achieve continuous improvement - without adopting any of the commercial 'methodologies, without using expensive consultants. You will , of course, have to put in some effort ... mainly thought! But it is possible - for any busines.

Quick Quiz: How are decisions made at your firm?
When combined with other macro-level indicators of the health of a firm, understanding of decision-making style provides both executives and OD consultants with data to zero-in on hot spots for either removal or targeted improvement activities.

Change Management Can Lead to Rigidity and Resistance to Change
Beware of formal organization improvement or "change management" (an oxymoron) plans. Like strategic plans, organization improvement or change management plans can reduce an organization's effectiveness. They can lead to rigidity, bureaucracy, and resistance to change. This sounds like an argument against planning. It's not. We have found that constant and ongoing personal, team, and organization improvement planning is vital. But too many "change management" and improvement plans are built on the same faulty premise as strategic planning - that there is a right path, which can be determined in advance and then implemented. We often hear managers declare that they have the right strategic or improvement plan, but the reason things aren't going according to plan is because of "execution problems." This is a deadly assumption.

Process Management Pathways and Pitfalls (Part Two)
Make sure all your process improvement activities are clearly and tightly linked to your strategic imperatives. Each effort should also have highly focused and specific improvement goals (that are an aggressive, major stretch) and measurements. Establish feedback and follow-up steps for each process management and improvement team.

Why Most Change Programs and Improvement Initiatives Fail
Many team and organization change and improvement efforts are lost or badly bewildered. Decades of studies have consistently shown that 50-70 percent are failing. There are as many reasons that improvement endeavors lose their way, as there are people, teams, and organizations trying to improve.

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