by Bill Fotsch and John Case These days, management thinkers and big-company executives are all touting the virtues of agile. But what is agile? Agile is a philosophy and a set of management tools that first took hold in corporate IT departments. Instead of following conventional approaches...
by Bill Fotsch March 17, 2020 Crisis response is on the minds of everyone as a result of the coronavirus. Certainly, that is the case with my many coaching clients. I feel it even more urgently as I speak with my co-owner of One Week Bath, a...
The other day, Bill told John a story about a coaching engagement he had embarked on some years ago. “It was with a large media company,” he said. “The company’s executives were convinced that they wanted to pursue open-book management. They had already spoken...
Call it the Curse of the Company Owner: nonstop, 24/7 responsibility for the business, usually accompanied by 80-hour weeks and exactly no work-life balance. The curse leads a lot of entrepreneurs to make a firm resolution every January 1st. This year, I’ll let go of...
CEO of Seattle’s Gravity Payments, he’s the guy who promised to raise every employee’s annual salary to at least $70,000 over the next three years. This is where he is now. Source: Forbes | Two Cheers For The ,000-A-Year Minimum Wage...
“God bless us, every one!” said Tiny Tim at the end of Charles Dickens’s classic tale A Christmas Carol. Scrooge had become a new man, and Bob Cratchit’s family was about to enjoy a big turkey dinner. The story is a reminder that this...
A couple of years ago, the American Psychological Association released a study of trust in the workplace. The findings were stark. About one in four Americans actively mistrust their employer. About half believe that their employer is not open and upfront with them. As Warby...
The bottom of a Zambian copper mine might seem an unlikely place to find budding capitalists. But there they were. This is Bill’s story, so we’ll let him tell it in the first person. I was walking through the Konkola mine, a mile below the...
“Get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus,” the management expert Jim Collins famously advised. If you really could get those right people and only those right people on your bus, you would no doubt have a better business....
At some point you will want to retire from the company you founded. If you don’t have a son or daughter ready to take over, you will probably want to sell the business. And who will be the buyer? Maybe your management team can scrape...