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September 2023 – New-Customer SOS (Shiny Object Syndrome)
McKinsey & Company has revealed a top-secret competitive advantage for incumbent companies: their existing customers. Customer retention is almost always less expensive than customer acquisition. And the data supporting that common knowledge is striking: McKinsey found that the most effective growth companies produce 80% of their value “from their core business – principally, unlocking new…
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July 2023 – Leadership That’s Legit
Companies give CEOs an enormous amount of authority to lead the people in their organizations. But authority is a blunt instrument and new CEOs and business leaders should ‘resist authority’ from becoming their main leadership tool. And while competence provides a leader with greater influence than simply authority, an article in Harvard Business Review finds…
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June 2023 – SPACs Give Their Goodwill Back
Sometimes companies throw a business-related Hail Mary pass and hope for the best. But many of the pass attempts by companies that went public through the non-traditional IPO process known as SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies) in the past 2 years have landed incomplete. Including a SPAC from former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, which cost…
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May 2023 – Whatever Floats Your Business Boat…
Timing is everything – and when it comes to financial float it so happens that time actually is money.
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April 2023 – When Companies Buy Back Their Shares and Go Home
It’s never fun when a kid threatens to take their ball and go home. What about when companies do it with their shares of stock? 2023 is shaping up to be a big year for share buybacks, with more than $1 trillion in repurchases expected by the S&P 500 alone. That’s a lot of money…
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March 2023 – We Are The (Executive) Champions of the World. And of your Business Simulation Class.
With all due respect to the band Queen – we are not ‘the champions of the world’ in which our business simulation classes run. Instead, we need an actual Executive Champion to keep on fighting ‘til the end. And through their participation and influence, to help support our classes. Executive support is valuable for anything…
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February 2023 – Training Programs – Good for Employee Engagement (and for robots too)
Our previous posts on employee engagement have discussed The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, and the persistent war for talent. Perhaps the U.S. chairman of PwC has also read our posts – but in his opinion talent has already won the war… If you can’t beat them, join them. Learning and development training programs, it turns…
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January 2023 – Quietly Firing the Quiet Quitters
Last month we wrote about The Great Resignation and the employee engagement challenges that have arisen post-Covid. But let’s quit discussing that and start quietly talking about quitting… “Quiet quitting” is a catchy and popular buzz phrase to describe employees who are disengaged from their jobs and who do the least amount of work to…
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December 2022 – Did Your Simulation Get the Memos?
Simulations are high-tech learning solutions – but sometimes you need to get off the digital and get on the paper. Jeff Bezos said that replacing PowerPoint presentations at Amazon with “six-page, narratively-structured” printed paper memos was the smartest thing they ever did. We’ve talked in previous blog posts about adding pen-and-paper exercises to business simulation…
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November 2022 – Never Surveyed a Customer We Didn’t Like
Companies are in business to fulfill their customers’ needs and/or wants, and producing satisfied customers is one of the most important business results that a company can achieve. The best companies strive not only to deeply understand the needs and wants of their target customers – but also to understand how well they are fulfilling…