Shared Wisdom
Quitter, Camper, Climber: Who’s on Your Team?
By Richard Lavin, Founder, LEVERAGEDWISDOM richard.lavin@leveragedwisdom.com Years ago I met Doug Tomkins, an incredibly successful young man who by his early 30 years had built a $100 million women’s clothing line distributing nationally to all the top department stores and
CEO Chief Empathy Officer
The burden of leadership will grow heavy over the coming days, weeks and months. In “normal” times your success has enabled you to care for many …your immediate and extended families, your employees, your vendors and your customers. As well
Finders, Minders & Grinders: What’s Your Role?
A LEVERAGEDWISDOM Member, founder and managing partner of a prominent accounting firm, once described his workforce as divided among Finders, Minders and Grinders. In the context of a professional services firm one can quickly imagine what these roles entail:
Enough With The Shovel: A LEVERAGEDWISDOM Insight
We all know the rule of holes…if you’re in one, stop digging! A hole in business is an unpleasant place where: 1) There is no return on the investment of time or money. 2) A business relationship continues to be
Success as a Blind Spot, No Lessons Learned
Most entrepreneurs are smart and if nothing else, resilient. Their tolerance for pain and risk would impress a US Navy Seal. They work hard, duck, bob and weave, believe when others don’t, pull wins out of thin air and sometimes get
Purple? No. Meet For Drinks? Yes!
Twelve CEOs were staring at six bottles of nail polish I had placed on the conference room table. (Two women and ten men were participating in their monthly LEVERAGEDWISDOM peer learning meeting. I asked the women to hold their answers.)
If You Run Your Business as Though You’re Going to Sell It, What’s the Number?
As an entrepreneurial CEO, owner, how do you benchmark your performance and that of your company as you go through the stages of growth and meet your “lifestyle” aspirations? If you’re like some CEOs I know, you may find yourself
Stand on your desk!!! Get behind the counter!!! Break down the walls!!! You’re boring!!!!
A CEO’s perspective and vision are often defined by their routines. So, it is useful for them to break their routines in order to gain new perspectives. Example: Stand on your desk!!!
Process Choke Point: Indecision is a Decision.
Being CEO/Owner means you have to make decisions in a timely and effective manner. Yes or No…Heads or Tails…Left or Right. At LEVERAGEDWISDOM, we’re all for a well-researched thoughtful measured decision making process that’s inclusive of others. After all we
Choke Points #1: Person, Position or Process
At LEVERAGEDWISDOM we work on our Member CEO’s choke points often leading to unusual action steps. In military strategy, choke points are geographical features; such as bridge, valley, or strait which an army or navy is forced to pass through.
What’s the expiration date on your business?
“We tackle the tough questions that keep owners of privately held businesses up at night.” Richard Lavin The stark reality is that there is life cycle to everything. At some point even the greatest waterway has to be widened (the
Choose One At Your Peril: The Disciplines of Market Leaders
The Discipline of Market Leaders became a much revered business book in the mid-90s. At LEVERAGEDWISDOM the book generated vigorous discussion and ultimately disagreement with the authors. Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema claimed that market leadership derived from choosing one
The Next Entrepreneurial Generation: Still Lonely at the Top
Among the members of LEVERAGEDWISDOM is a new generation of entrepreneurs, including the sons and daughters of former members. I call them “Educated – Inventive – Driven.” This new generation “gets” what LEVERAGEDWISDOM is all about and is predisposed to
Wisdom of Crowds
“No one of us is as smart as all of us” or The Wisdom of Crowds. A LEVERAGEDWISDOM Member recently summed up his meeting day experience by declaring, that it seemed “No one of us is as smart as all
This will be for the “S” curve of life and business.
Watch this video
How Business Owners Can Avoid the Next Liquidity Trap
If you survived the economic tsunami of the last 36 months, you know that not everyone lost their house, but everyone got wet, and some came out soaked to the bone. John Keynes, the influential British economist, once said “the
Beware of Black Swans and Dead Elephants
In “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” author Nassim Nicholas Taleb contends that our belief in the predictability of events, based on what’s happened in the past, is so ingrained that we either overlook or can’t conceive