Considering the pace of change in today's world, agile business—the process of making quick decisions based on the information you have and the willingness to adopt new strategies as you go along—has gone from being a competitive advantage to a necessity for many organizations. I was curious about how modern business owners view the future of agile business, so I talked with Adelaida Diaz-Roa, co-founder...

Many organizations pride themselves on having predictable policies and procedures that drive performance and growth. However, given the rate of change in today's business world, sometimes being inflexible can be a problem rather than a solution. Having an agile process can help. Agile processes are plans that involve advance planning and organization but also allow you to quickly change course if needed. To learn how...

According to a 2017 CareerBuilder survey1 of 2,250 U.S. hiring managers and HR professionals survey, companies lost an average of $14,900 on every “bad hire” in the last year, and it's a common mistake — nearly three in four employers (74 percent) say they've hired the wrong person for a position and that half of these bad hires have quit within the first six months of employment. When asked how...

In my experience as a workforce author and consultant, I’ve observed that organizations tend to invest more in their employees during good economic times, and pull back development efforts when their businesses are feeling the pinch. Let’s recall what we learned from our earliest years in school. Our teachers encouraged us to master material through repetition. We’d be introduced to a concept in class,...

Interested in a way to maximize your potential and achieve greater levels of performance and job satisfaction? How about using that same strategy to help your company realize its most ambitious goals? Connectional Intelligence is proving to be a powerful conduit for achieving both. The brainchild of leading business strategists and researchers Erica Dhawan and Saj-Nicole Joni, Connectional Intelligence (CxQ) was coined i...

Cornerstone OnDemand researchers have discovered a surprisingly simple way to increase productivity: better office seating arrangements. In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, Jason Corsello and Dylan Minor described the results of a new study, which suggested that who an employee sits next to affects how they perform — and that grouping the right types of coworkers together can improve productivity and wo...

Being overlean could be your downfall. Why project management is not just for the big firms. Shazir Mucklai is a startlingly young angel investor and adviser in disruptive startups. He currently runs a six-figure PR firm helping startups commercialize their products and launch their ideas. I say that he is startlingly young because according to his LinkedIn profile, he is still in college. One of things I love about w...

According to Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and author of the book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, a tour of duty is an employee situation that involves working full-time in consecutive roles within an organization, working full-time in consecutive organizations for the purpose of up-skilling, or taking breaks or dialing down from a full-time role in an organization. Within a single organization...

An over-reliance on process and procedures can lead to poor decision-making and a lack of agility. I know that the topic of generational differences irritates some people. My personal experience, though, is that when it comes to certain things, baby boomer points of view do often differ from millennial points of view. One of these areas of debate is process. Why (Some) Boomers Like Process and (Some) Millennials Don&r...

Lighthouse Research Principal Analyst Ben Eubanks hammered home the importance of culturally embedded diversity and inclusion practices. According to Deloitte, employees that rated their employers highly for both diversity and inclusion were 80 percent more likely to say their organization was high performing. Corporate boards with three or more women have 50 percent higher return on equity, and 40 percent higher return on...