The Pragmatic Strategist

Small Business’ Competitive Advantage

Author Marc Compeau recently wrote an article on Forbes entitled, Cost-Cutting Won’t Get You There.  In it he touches on many points that seem to be recurring lately. First, the idea that cutting costs are the ticket to solving financial woes.  Yes, of course, fiscal discipline is important and if your business is bleeding money [...]

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Scrappy Swimlane High Level Overview

Much thanks to Sherry Lowry from Bridging Futures for this picture. As with all items of this type, it’s eerily familiar enough to be both hysterical and cringe-worthy for those of us who make a career out of this. (Click on the image to see the details.) Send to Facebook

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Keeping Your Spirits Up During a Job Hunt

Job hunting is rough for oh-so-many reasons. One of the things that is hardest about it, though, is managing your own attitude and spirits. If there is one thing that is liable to get you into trouble during a job hunt, it is unmanaged anxiety. I’ve written before about some of the things that I [...]

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A Left Turn in the Gen X Timeline

Sort of figures: tonight was the first time in weeks I’ve been able to set aside some time to do some catch-up blogging. I have a list of things I’ve been meaning to write about — I was just trying to work the opportunity into my schedule. And now that tonight is finally here, I [...]

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100 Ways to Kill a Concept

Otherwise known as “How NOT to lead people, teams or projects.” Alternately, “What you should never say to anyone you care about.” the boss won’t go for that. the lawyers won’t go for that. the accountants won’t go for that. the client won’t go for that. the salespeople won’t go for that. the investors won’t [...]

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To Say Agile, Or Not to Say Agile… That is the Question

I had an interesting conversation yesterday after I gave a presentation. I was talking about the necessary functions — particularly when it comes to communications, documentation, change management and entry/exit criteria — of project management in an Agile development process. The “interesting” conversation I had afterward was because one of the attendees (in a private [...]

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Qualities of a Great Speaker – Connecting with the Audience

The last speaking quality I want to cover in my series on what makes a quality public speaker is the ability of a speaker to connect with their audience. There are thousands of ways to do this, and how a speaker goes about it will often be dictated by a combination of their content (as [...]

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