“5 Signs It’s Time to Hire an Assistant” by Ali Brown
I often see my entrepreneur clients fall prey to a stubborn mindset: they strongly resist the idea of hiring help. Women entrepreneurs especially get stuck here. But the truth is, trying to do it all yourself doesn’t make you a better business owner. In fact, it can hurt your business growth and throw your personal life off balance. An assistant can help you manage your business more efficiently, freeing you to focus on the big picture. Here are FIVE tell-tale signs that you need to get help asap: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Once you decide to hire an assistant, you can ask your colleagues for recommendations. You don’t have to spend a lot of money, or wait another day, to get help for your business. © 2012 Ali International, LLC WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? “Entrepreneur mentor Ali Brown teaches women around the world how to start and grow a profitable business that make a positive impact.
Understanding the European Debt Crisis | Top Financial Advisor Blog | Manna Capital Management
It’s good to understand Europe’s debt crisis and why it’s affecting U.S. markets. Here’s an overview of how the European Union operates, why the euro is in danger, and what the crisis could mean to American investors. Unless you regularly read the Financial Times or otherwise keep up with world financial news, you may be wondering how the crisis in Europe came to be and what effect it might have on the U.S. economy. Here, in a nutshell, is the backstory, along with possible scenarios for how it might play out at home and abroad. The European Union In 1951, six European nations came together to form the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) for the purpose of preventing future war between France and Germany and to create a common market for coal and steel. The goal of the EU is to ensure the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital by abolishing passport controls and maintaining a single market through a standardized system of laws that apply in all member states. The euro
Compensation Systems For Agile Teams » Tools For Agile Blog
There is a discussion going on in one of the Scrum lists about compensation in a scrum team. How do we reward individual performers when Scrum plays down individual performance? It’s a mistake to think that rewarding individual performers does not work in a Scrum team. Forget Scrum, it does not work anywhere in the organization! As much as thirty years ago, Deming listed as Deadly Disease #3 – Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance This is because performance evaluation kills cooperation, morale and intrinsic motivation. A particularly bad thing to do is stack ranking, i.e ranking everyone in order from best to worst. Now, are these the kinds of behaviour that organizations want to encourage? Consider this Harvard Business School case study on Hewlett-Packard. The teams were frustrated that factors out of their control, such as the delivery of parts, affected their work. More recently, Jeffrey Pfeffer testified in the US Congress on Personnel Reform.
Eurozone debt crisis: the key charts you need to understand what's happening | News
How bad are things in Europe - and how does each country compare? This week has seen anti-austerity strikes and protests across Southern Europe, with Greece, Italy and Spain all hit by disturbances. In Europe's largest ever coordinated industrial action, tens of thousands of workers took to the streets on Wednesday after the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) issued a statement that austerity is "dragging Europe into economic stagnation, indeed recession". Having rallied the previous day, markets across Europe fell on Wednesday, with the FTSE 100, Dax (Germany), Cac (France) and Ibex (Spain) all closing down. We wanted to see which key indicators are the best for comparing Europe and might help us understand what's going on a little better. 1. These are the big scary numbers - although it's still regularly mixed up with the deficit (see below) by journalists and politicians alike. 2. 3. 4. 5. Download the data • DATA: download the full spreadsheet More open data World government data
Competition Is NOT Part of Your Business Model
Every couple of weeks somebody sends me an email writing that I'm missing a building block in the Business Model Canvas. Often, they point out that competition is missing. They're wrong. "Competition" is not a business model building block, it's part of the environment in which you design your business model. Though I believe we're too obsessed with competition, it would obviously be naive not to take into account existing or potential competitors when you design your business model. We came up with this environmental model, because there was no concept out there that looked at the Business Model Design Environment in a simple, holistic, and visual way.
Be Cool In Crisis: 5 Public Relations Lessons From the Secret Service Scandal
One could argue the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has made every public relations mistake possible in mismanaging the recent Secret Service scandal. In doing so, it has inadvertently escalated a manageable crisis to one that's reached DEFCON 5, to borrow the military parlance, if I may. Let's be honest: Every organization will sustain a crisis at one stage in its lifetime. Here are five proven tips you can use to avoid public disgrace, business disruption, or some horrible combination of both. 1. The worst time to test your crisis plan is in the midst of an actual crisis. The result? 2. As sure as the sun sets in the West, every organization we've trained in crisis preparedness completely overlooks a key constituent audience in its response plan. The single best crisis tool I've ever used is called a constituent audience matrix. 3. Nothing is worse than being caught unaware. Crisis response is now a 24/7 reality. 4. Remember the BP Gulf crisis? 5.
