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"Fear is destroying companies. Or more specifically, fear of loss is causing companies to destroy themselves.
As managers are forced to do more with less, contend with limited resources, or battle for headcount and budget, many will begin to build walls to help protect their ability to meet their own local goals. Unfortunately, sometimes those walls become so high that those inside lose sight of the ultimate outcome. Their world becomes defined by the piece, and not the puzzle. With the best of intentions, barriers are born, particularly if the rules that are created make it difficult for others outside of the silo to succeed."
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"We gave a talk at South By South West Interactive in 2010 and asked a room full of entrepreneurs who had written a business plan if they had actually looked at it since launch. A resounding 'no' came back. So we asked if the business they now owned and ran looked anything like the one they had written about in the business plan. Another 'no.' They all admitted that they had written the plan simply because they thought that is what you're supposed to do. They had exerted great effort on a document that they would not look at again. How does this make sense? And this is from entrepreneurs that made their business idea happen, these were the successful ones. So what of the thousands that started to write a plan, got a little stuck and gave up? What ideas have the world been deprived of because they believed they needed a fully detailed plan to make that thing real? [...]
The problem with writing a fixed plan is that you can get stuck in amber mode. You get so bogged down with hypotheticals, financial modeling and revenue projections that your cool business idea gets stuck in a spreadsheet and the light never goes green. Instead of focusing on making your business idea happen, you end up suffering from analysis paralysis: the number one killer of all great business ideas."
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"By the end of the manifesto I hope that you will be equipped with sufficient knowledge and practical actions that you know what to do and how to do it should you become subject to workplace bullying in the future. And I also hope that reading this manifesto will assist those of you who have already been targeted by a workplace bully to be able to process your experience and find relief from the nagging self-doubts that often form part of the aftermath of an experience of workplace bullying."
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"These types of relationships are not easily formed nor are they formed overnight. They require exceptional care, attention, and a focus on continuously exceeding expectations. At Zane's, where we have chosen to compete on service rather than on price alone, it means providing unparalleled customer service. We can never accept an unhappy customer, nor look at unsatisfied customer as an inevitable part of doing business. This method goes beyond the mindset of making an unhappy customer happy or simply matching the offers of our competitors. Creating lifetime customers requires that you offer every customer or potential customer more service than they consider reasonable. Further, it means that you actively solicit customer feedback about what you could be doing better and use that information to expand and tweak your offerings to best service the customer."
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"When trust levels are high, so is the quality and performance of business—and the reverse is also true. These facts are demonstrated dramatically when we look at the financial outcomes of companies that are among the best to work for and their peer companies that aren't.
Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For have roughly double the rates of return, income, return on assets, profits, stock market returns and employee and customer retention rates compared to peer companies."
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