text: “People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.” ~ Thomas Sowell “Has anyone ever said, ‘I wish I could go to more meetings today?’” ~ Matt Mullenweg “Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.” ~ John Kenneth Galbraith I was going to say that meetings get a bad rap,
  
  Brendan Reid, a business writer, author, and coach, points out that strong interviewing skills are critical to the success of any hiring manager. Obviously, bringing people on board who have the right skills, knowledge, experience, and temperament will have enormous benefit to the hiring manager and to the company. Yet few companies, except the very
  
  A lot has been written lately about “employee engagement” . . . some of it right here. The Gallup organization, which has studied it for many years, says employee engagement can be measured by the strength of the emotional connection an employee feels toward his or her company. If the employee sings the company song,
  
  Even though the Great Recession is far back in our rearview mirror, the recovery has been painfully slow, particularly for small businesses. Small business owners have not gone on a hiring spree, in part, because they have learned how to get along without some of the positions they eliminated during the recession. Also, because the
  
  For most of us, when we think about innovation, we think about companies like Apple, Microsoft, or Google. We think about breakthrough, disruptive technologies like the GraphicalUser Interface which took access to the Worldwide Web from the hands of a few geeks who could write computer code and gave it to the masses. In other
  
  If you’re not a hockey fan, the name John McDonough probably doesn’t mean much to you. But if you’re a Chicago Blackhawks fan, you probably have a shrine to him somewhere in your home. He joined the Blackhawks in 2007 as President, and under his stewardship, the team’s season ticketholder base has grown from 3,400
  
  Decision-making and leadership are two CEO skills inextricably entwined. It’s true that you can be a world class decision-maker and still be a lousy leader . . . that is, you can be a great decision-maker but still have other behavioral characteristics that disqualify you as a great leader. However, the reverse is not true.
  
  “When you’re a little bit dumb and naïve, things get done that no one believed could be done.” We don’t know who said that, but it’s true. Consider the new, fresh-faced young salesman who marches into an account we wrote off long ago as a waste of time. We all laugh at his innocence and
  
  In his book, “A Class With Drucker” William Cohen talks about the “lost lessons” he learned from renowned management guru, Peter Drucker, as a first-year graduate student in Drucker’s classroom. One of those lessons was to disregard so-called “conventional wisdom,” avoid being a crowd follower, and draw your own conclusions about a situation based on
  
  Fast Company magazine recently hosted the “Fast Company Innovation Festival” and invited fifty executives, not only from large well-known companies like GE and Nike, but also from relatively obscure companies like Grey North America and Birchbox, to attend. The only common denominator shared by the participants was they all came from companies known for being