Articles

As a leader you commit yourself to continuous improvement because you know that “good enough” doesn’t last. You work on self development so that you can be the leader who heralds needed changes in a way that preserves and elevates the integrity of your organization. It becomes inevitable that when you hold continuous improvement as a primary value, it is a value you lead with, and infuse into your company culture. Improvement is a must to expect of yourself, but if your employees are not the owners, and not all of them see themselves as having much to gain from walking the extra mile, can you expect the same from them? If you’ve ever faced the question of how to...

Ryan, of Be The Match, and five of his peers were selected to participate in an out-of-the-box experiment called, The Innovation Lab. Sequestered away from the rest of the organization, the team was responsible for researching umbilical cord blood donation and seeing how it can help with blood marrow registry and research objectives. Ryan’s team was tasked with a problem-- not with solving it, but rather with developing recommendations for how to address the problem so that the company could fix it. The experiment was a success. Ryan talks to Bruce Holoubek, owner of Contracted Leadership, and Host of The Development Exponent Podcast to provide us with the organizational and developmental perspectives and insights from that experiment. If your organization...

Live or die? Not too long ago our ability to survive directly correlated to our ability to develop relationships with our families and local tribes. In modern times-- and especially in business, our ability to develop relationships can mean the difference between thriving and losing out. We are biologically wired to be social creatures, and so it seems that building networks should come naturally. But, our prehistoric system is able to handle no more than 100 relationships, 50 semi-effectively, and in the last decade the number of accessible people and the ease of connection has increased exponentially. Now you can be in touch with tens of thousands of people. This is a bit more than we are designed to meaningfully...

The Secret We have to admire the bravery of those entrepreneurs on Shark Tank. They put their life savings, mortgages, and reputations on the line for the chance to launch a winning idea or innovative product. In a sea of products and services, they see themselves as uniquely capable of serving the need. But, how do they feel sure that they are the ones to disrupt an industry or to make the sales happen? Aside from the passion and grit, there are behind the scenes resources like EnventysPartners. Enventys Partners is a firm that combines product development and marketing services to help entrepreneurs, startups, and enterprise companies quickly bring their innovative products to the market. They’ve helped entrepreneurs raise over...

There’s a key success factor that all startup professionals, leaders, and founders share: they begin their professional journeys fueled by passion and purpose. That passion gets us through the toughest phases of initializing our plans. But, eventually we hit speed bumps: time passes, energy depletes, outside forces pull in different directions, personal relationships require attention, we fall out of touch, and plans don’t go as planned. As leaders we feel compound pressure to keep the gears turning not just for ourselves but for everyone who depends on us. For an inside view on how one founder overcomes some of these inevitable challenges, Bruce Holoubek, owner of Contracted Leadership, and Host of The Development Exponent Podcast talks with Luke Perkerwicz, co-founder...