Sanborn on Teamwork The ______ of the Leader According to John Maxwell, “The speed of the leader is the speed of the team.” While that’s true, it is important to remember that the leader sets many agendas in addition to speed. Consider this phrase: The ______ of the leader is the ______ of the team.…
Manage the Customer’s Experience The Palm Desert Marriott is a beautiful resort near Palm Springs, California. This past March, I was at the resort to speak to the American Hardware Manufacturing Association. The night before my breakfast presentation, I dined in one of the resort’s fine restaurants, The Tuscany. While the food and ambiance were…
Have Some Fun Passengers on the 6:15 am flight from Denver to San Francisco are rarely at their perkiest. From experience, I know it can be a sleeping, uneventful flight. Of course it depends on which flight attendant is on the airplane intercom. As we approached San Francisco, we were treated to some more announcements…
10 Practices of Exceptional Service My research of and work with the very best service providers demonstrates that they all do a lot of things right. However, I’ve found that there are at least 10 practices that they have in common. They are the following: 1. Eliminate Irritants Customer service is as much what you…
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau Have you experienced a failed change lately? Been a part of a team or an organization that attempted something…
Creating Change If there’s one thing that’s constant in life, it’s that life is always changing. Just when you’ve reached your quarterly sales goal, your boss raises it for the next quarter. Just when you’ve got your job down to a science, restructuring places you in a new department. Just when you’ve learned the latest…
(Implementation Is Everything) The three-letter extension that follows a period in PC file names indicates the type of information contained. .exe, short for executable, means that double clicking on the file will launch a program or perform an operation. Many companies are files chock full of good ideas; the problem is that no .exe follows.…
Why Leaders Fail by Mark Sanborn, CSP, CPAE Headlines regularly inform us of the public downfall of leaders from almost every area of endeavor–business, politics, religion, and sports. One day they’re on top of the heap, the next, the heap’s on top of them. Of course, we think that such catastrophic failure could never happen…
Lessons for Leaders “…companies that do make a lot of money almost never have as their goal ‘making a lot of money.’ They tend to be run by enthusiasts who, in the normal course of gratifying their own tastes and curiosities, come up with products or services so startling, so compelling, and so exciting that…
Hungarian inventor Dennis Gabor won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1971 for his invention of holography. Today holograms are familiar to most Americans. From usage by Disney at its amusement parks to imprints on credit cards to framed wall hangings, this three dimensional photography is increasingly familiar to most Americans today. What is less familiar to most…