Roy Osing, Author at TalentCulture

10 Things Smart Business People Do

Smart business people: Understand that the way to serve customers in an exemplary way is to serve employees in the same manner. If dazzling service doesn’t happen on the inside it’s unlikely to happen on the outside. Have a strategic game plan for their organization and use it as THE context for all tactical activity. Chasing tactics that don’t have direct line of sight to strategy is a characteristic of non-performing organizations. Don’t over-analyze everything. The degree of study depends on the risk associated with the decision to be made. They don’t get mesmerized with the tools of analysis; they use

Stand-out Leaders Create Greatness

Have you ever wondered how stand-out leaders create, not just successful futures for their organizations, but breakthrough and amazing futures? Here’s how. Stand-out leaders don’t participate in the bottoms-up leadership world. Why not? Because the bottoms-up world places emphasis on management developing proposals and gaining approval before moving forward. For example, putting a proposition to the leader, which typically involves a brief assessment of a few potential alternatives and the selection of the best course of action to take. The course of action the leader then chooses often the one providing the highest potential net benefit to the organization at least

A Contrarian Approach to Time Management

Is it time to do a 180 degree shift on the subject of time management? So much has been written on how to manage one’s time more effectively; I sometimes wonder if the guidance being offered by so many “experts” is resonating with people. In today’s world, cluttered as it is with communications, volumes of advice often go unheard and unread — despite their worth. So let’s try a contrarian approach. Let’s see if this gets through the clutter. Here are six valuable tips on how NOT to manage your time. These tips will guide you to waste time and ensure

Eradicate These 10 Dysfunctions and Create a Stand-Out Culture

Every organization would like to build a high performance stand-out culture, but these ten non-strategic activities are barriers that must be overcome. They are practised by most organizations and produce very little. They consume precious time and suck up emotional energy. 1. Committee Work. How many Committees do you have working on stuff? What would happen if you reduced the number by 50% and empowered folks to make a decision and get on with execution? Committees are charged with the responsibility of coming up with recommendations that satisfy everyone. Often these decisions take a long time to reach, they are watered-down

5 Essentials of Strategic Renewal

Every organizational strategy needs regular updating regardless of how successful you’ve been. It’s simply not good enough to develop your strategy and put it on the shelf, expecting that it will work indefinitely. Always be looking for and recording the factors that have changed since you crafted the last version of your plan. The business environmental involves dynamics that are relentless and unpredictable and it’s better to be prepared for them by proactively renewing your strategy every year. Here are 5 basics of the renewal process: 1. Revisit Your Strategy. If you don’t have a strategic game plan for your organization,

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Why Benchmarking Sucks

Benchmarking has its roots in the Total Quality Management philosophy. It’s a technique aimed at taking advantage of what other organizations have learned and successfully implemented and improve their own performance. The Benchmarking Process Is Simple: Determine Who Is Best In Class At Something And Copy Them Benchmarking is usually aimed at a business process or operations. Go-to-market processes for products, order fulfillment and human resource practices are among the many organizational functions that get benchmarked. Disguise it any way you want, but benchmarking is nothing more than following who is believed to be the leader of the herd. And if you’re

#TChat Preview: How Employee Assistance Programs Engage And Nurture Talent

Stand-Out Leaders Putter At These 7 Things

Old school leadership is about control and pushing people to achieve results; setting and communicating objectives; delegating tasks; measuring results. Nothing wrong with old school, it’s just that different priorities and actions are required if leaders are to meet the challenges of todays competitive economy and changing employee expectations. New school leaders make it their priority to help people; to “take care” of them. They make it easier for people to do their jobs. They run interference; bash barriers and eliminate the grunge preventing progress. New School Leaders Putter At These 7 Basics 1. They are mindlessly focused on detail. Detail about

How To Cure A Sick Company Culture

Performance wanes. Employee engagement falls and morale sinks. These are tell-tale signs that your culture is sick and needs attention. So how do you go about fixing it? First, three housekeeping questions: 1. What is “culture”? Culture describes an organization’s working environment. How people behave. What they talk about. How they interact with and treat one another. The values they respect and hold sacred. 2. What is the purpose of culture? It enables the achievement of goals. It is a tactic, if you will, that facilitates healthy and effective execution of a company’s strategy because it engages every employee in its

10 Ways To Escape From The Crowd

One of the more serious problems in society today is spacial separation; we are way too close to one another. We find ourselves almost in the living room of our neighbor. Students sit shoulder-to-shoulder in classrooms and lecture halls. Sidewalks are jammed with a stream of people heading in the same direction to the same destination. People’s brains are cluttered with the same traditional academic teachings with little room for an original thought. We live in a crowded world with plurality forcing us to conform. The crowd is a blend of commonality. People move in a blur with no individual identity.

8 Actions You Can Take To Survive A Shift

When do you know a shift is occurring that will significantly alter the competitive landscape and terms of play? There are some people who lead a shift and determine its direction. Steve Jobs engineered a series of discontinuities that not only changed the world of communication and social engagement, they also vaulted his company to another level. But for most of us “mere mortals,” a shift is experienced after is has begun and marketplace changes are being felt. Most retailers waited to see how online buying was going to evolve before morphing their brick-and-mortar business into virtual stores with cyber-selling. The

11 Ways To Lose Yourself In The Crowd

“The crowd” is a mass of people who all look the same. They are indistinguishable from one another. They are all conformists to a standard set of rules, whether they be in business or in life. They are not individuals, but rather express the lowest common denominator of the mass they are embedded in. They are all “average”, expressing all that the word implies. It is safe in the crowd. You get to hide out and avoid exposure and recognition. There is safety in numbers particularly when every digit is the mirror image of the next. It’s warm. Heat, lots of

How To Avoid The New-Idea Trap

More technology. More suppliers. More products and services. More social media tools. More business tools. New opportunities to improve our bottom-line performance are constantly “raining down” on us these days, making it a challenge to decide which to seriously consider and which to just let slide by. Here are four skills that standout leaders use to successfully deal with the seemingly unlimited number of “potentially amazing” things that come their way. 1. They have a game plan for their business. Your game plan represents the CONTEXT for evaluating the new stuff that comes along. Think about your game plan as your touchstone

Promise Nothing If You Can’t Execute

Execution is THE most critical determinant of an organization’s success. Few organizations, however, do it well, so it represents arguably the best opportunity to stand-out from others in a crowded marketplace of mediocre players. Let’s face it, we are tired of promises; we hear them to the point where it is almost nauseating. They promise to delight us, create memories for us, give us the lowest prices and best service ever and provide us with the latest and greatest in technology. My eyes glaze over when I hear this stuff. What we really want are these “aspirational lobs” consistently delivered to

2 Questions To Get The Creative Juices Flowing

There are significant challenges facing innovation in any organization. People are taught to be cautious and to make “informed” decisions based on thorough and rigorous analysis. As a result the process tends to be long and arduous and faces numerous levels of scrutiny before a decision is finally reached. Paralysis by analysis often sets in and current business momentum is maintained. Nothing changes. People are taught to avoid making mistakes. They witness how punishment is handed out to their colleagues and decide that risky actions have too much personal downside; they prefer the status quo. Nothing changes. These powerful forces act

How To Create A Competitive Claim That Is More Than Hot Air

Most companies struggle with defining what makes them unique; different from their competitors. They can’t answer the question “Why should I do business with you and NOT your competition?” in a succinct meaningful way. There are two traps they fall into. First, they generally speak to the internal capabilities an organization has (what leadership believes are the differentiators) rather than being explicit about how they compare to others in the market. “We provide the highest quality products.”; “Our people are our greatest asset.” They stress technology. They talk about their size and claim market leadership. Second, most competitive advantage statements are

Be Different Or Be Dead

BE DiFFERENT or be dead: the stand-out leaders’ mantra NEVER has it been more important to carve out a distinctive and unique place for your organization in the market than it is today. The economy is unpredictable. Competition is intense as new competitors are entering the market at a blistering rate. New technology “rains down” relentlessly. Markets are cluttered with sameness; products and services are undifferentiated and competitive claims are lost in the crowd. Customers are more empowered than ever before, establishing relationships with suppliers that deliver distinctive solutions and ignoring those that don’t. Which organizations are successful and survive this challenging business environment, and what

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Roy Osing

Roy Osing

10 Things Smart Business People Do

Stand-out Leaders Create Greatness

A Contrarian Approach to Time Management

Eradicate These 10 Dysfunctions and Create a Stand-Out Culture

5 Essentials of Strategic Renewal

Why Benchmarking Sucks

Stand-Out Leaders Putter At These 7 Things

How To Cure A Sick Company Culture

10 Ways To Escape From The Crowd

8 Actions You Can Take To Survive A Shift

11 Ways To Lose Yourself In The Crowd

How To Avoid The New-Idea Trap

Promise Nothing If You Can’t Execute

2 Questions To Get The Creative Juices Flowing

How To Create A Competitive Claim That Is More Than Hot Air

Be Different Or Be Dead

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Roy Osing

Roy Osing

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