Your Leadership IQ

Lech Walesa told Congress that there is a declining world market for words. He’s right. The only thing the world believes anymore is behavior, because we all see it instantaneously. None of us may preach anymore. We must behave.” Max DePree, Chairman Herman Miller Leaders lead, and leadership by example is the best technique as proven for thousands of years. No great leader has ever been...

Living in Contagious Oneness

What a wonderfully unsearchable gift … Christ in us! John’s gospel provides us with life-changing truth and encouragement regarding the heart and mind of our Creator. We have the incomprehensible privilege to be invited into eternal living unity with the only perfectly holy, unified, and intimate relationship in the universe; the Triune Godhead. Imagine the implications. For most of us, the...

Seizing the Moment (part 2)

Here we are, in the middle of an extended recession, hunkered down and unsure as to when the pressure will let up. Many of us are praying for restored demand and a healthy backlog that will allow us to “breathe easy” again. Is this where you are today? Is your attitude one of simply waiting out the slump and surviving to play the game another day the same way we always did? One of the grand...

Loyalty: An Engine For Healthy Growth

We’re quick to overly complicate what’s involved in building a healthy company. Overwhelmed by a continuing barrage of ‘helpful’ input from authors and consultants, we continually seek the latest ‘breakthrough’ ideas and techniques to catapult us past competitors and ‘beat the odds’ in becoming a long-term success story. Sadly, in spite of all the expert advice, just 22% of the...

Ministering from the Overflow

For people committed to such concepts as fairness and justice, God’s grace is beyond “amazing.” As those adopted by God and eternally viewed as righteous solely through our faith in Christ, we must constantly remind ourselves of the indescribable and undeserved nature of this free gift. Our crucified and risen Lord lived perfectly, and died, that we might escape sin’s hold and the law’s...

Marketing Demystified

 Marketing Demystified  “If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying “Circus coming to the Fairground Saturday,” that’s advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that’s promotion. If the elephant walks through the mayor’s flower bed, that’s publicity. And if you get the mayor to laugh about it,...

Growing Your Business-A Five Point Approach to Branding

A Five-Point Approach to Branding 1. Defining your Dominant Selling Idea (DSI) Our DSI is a unifying, energizing, focusing, trust-building, clutter-removing, lean-value-creating notion – a motivating difference at the moment of the purchase decision – that communicates our #1 position in a ‘desirable specialty’ that’s important to our target customers. That’s a mouthful, but unless...

Guerrilla Marketing – Doing a lot with a little

Jay Levinson, a long-time major ad agency executive, first popularized the term ‘Guerrilla Marketing’ in his 1984 best-selling book of the same name. In the generation since then, the guerrilla marketing label has morphed into a ‘hip’, catch-all banner which dozens of authors and speakers use to encompass marketing for small businesses, as well as various techniques in the digital, viral,...