Busy or Productive – Increase Your Productivity with These 8 Tips

Busy or Productive – Increase Your Productivity with These 8 Tips

by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments
Time is the one true constraint for all of us in our lives. We all have 24 hours in a day. We all have 60 minutes in an hour. You can't change the pace of time. But what we can change is how we use that time. Most people I know are busy within their constrained time. A few people I know are productive in that time. Are you busy or productive? Here are 15 tips that can help you highlight where you fall, and how you can improve your productivity, be more successful and reduce your stress. Not every tip will work for everyone. Individual work styles differ, and some people can optimize more or less in each of these areas. The most important factor to success in productivity improvement is to be conscious in your efforts. Take time to understand how you work today and how that could be improved. Then execute against that plan. (more…)...
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Scaling to Differentiation

Scaling to Differentiation

by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments
I recently wrote about the importance of "Framework Thinking" as a way to simplify how you look at problems, structures, and processes so I thought I would extend that thinking as an example of how you can think about how you organize your business structure. Scaling an organization requires an evolution of maturity in your structures, your processes, and your approach to priority management. Without recognizing the need for evolution and focusing on building your foundation you can find yourself in crisis mode. Scaling to differentiation is framework approach to avoiding this crisis. I have written about the importance of foundation as well in the past as it related specifically to building an innovation capability in your organization, but the same concept of foundation applies as you think about your organizational structure. (more…)...
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Simplify Alignment with Framework Thinking

Simplify Alignment with Framework Thinking

by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments
Entrepreneurs get started in business with a great idea and the energy to bring it to reality. Then they grow the business based on hard work. Hopefully that hard work translates into a growing team of exceptional team players around them. But at some point the outcomes of raw desire and entrepreneurial energy start to peak. Then the outputs turn downward as the organization grows and coordination becomes more difficult. What created success as a start-up organization was agility, organic collaboration, and energy-driven execution. Those wins start to falter as the number of clients, the scale of the opportunities, and the complexity of the organization rises. (more…)...
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Build a Strong Foundation for Innovation

Build a Strong Foundation for Innovation

by Tim Empringham, MBA2 Comments
Those of you who know me won't be shocked by the fact that I have a serious passion for innovation. I believe you always need to be constantly pushing your organization (and your life) forward. You need to focus on reinventing what you do and how you do it as often as possible to drive new value for your customers and your organization. To succeed, you need to build a strong foundation for innovation. Companies like GE or IBM who have consistently changed their business sold off core components, reinvented their primary revenue base, and evolved how they execute based on the demands of an evolving market. These are great examples of companies that innovate very well. But their innovative success isn't based solely on a mindset, fancy frameworks, or crazy wild innovators (although that helps). To earn the right to be innovative they first had to be exceptional companies. (more…)...
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It’s The End of the World (And I Feel Fine)

It’s The End of the World (And I Feel Fine)

by Tim Empringham, MBANo Comments
So today marks the end of the world according to the Mayan calendar and it also marks the end of my work days for 2012 so I thought it made a fitting setting to wish everyone all the best in the pending apocalypse,  or over the holiday season, whichever turns out to be more accurate. Television and the Internet have been clogged lately with reviews of the Mayan prediction for the end of the world, movies depicting the various ways we might be destroyed, and accounts of people who are preparing for the impending doom by installing bunkers and buying years worth of non-perishable food supplies. It all seems a bit comical to me, but in some ways I do think we are facing a fundamental shift in the world that could be equated to the Mayan prediction most accurately through the immortal words of Michael Stipe: It's the end of the world as we know it. No I don't believe that we'll be seeing...
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