Customer service can be the silver bullet that distinguishes a small business from its competitors. What is good customer service versus bad customer service?

Entrepreneur-turned-VC, Mark Suster, recently posted an article on his blog, Both Sides of the Table, highlighting what he considers to be the essential qualities of entrepreneurship.  At the heart of his post is a very, very simple philosophy: entrepreneurs just do it. For some people, this is easy.  Moving ahead, pulling the trigger, motivating people [...]

I often find myself frustrated dealing with people who sell themselves as “high level strategists.” I am not talking about consultants who are hired to help hone and build out a strategic vision for an organization; nor am I talking about internal specialists who are dedicated to researching and advising on strategic direction. What I [...]

I’ve had an interesting few weeks. My husband and I have been dealing with a lot of things at home, hence my absence from blogging for much of the past month, and I have started a new project with the New Media (a.k.a. “web”) team at KXAN-TV here in Austin. Between getting settled into the [...]

People who did not meet me until at or around my 25th birthday would never believe it, but in school, I was the Queen of Slackers. Truly. School was too easy, too routine and I spent too long doing it to be able to breath new life into the experience. I could dodge classes, do [...]

I had a couple of discussions this week that got me thinking back to the early days of my career. Aside from leaving me feeling older than I care to think about, it did spark a pleasant memory or two that I’ve been mulling over since. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how early career choices [...]

In a recent conversation with a friend, we were discussing corporate blogging efforts to engage existing customers. After reading Joshua-Michele Ross‘ post recently, on the Wells Fargo/Wachovia merger blog, I was excited to see yet one more company prepare to engage customers in this forum. That is, until we started talking in more detail. It [...]

A recent study conducted by BlessingWhite shows that a full one-third of over 2,000 supervisors interviewed “don’t have time to coach” their direct reports. While I find nothing inherently surprising in that statistic, I do find the reasoning behind it fundamentally flawed: the reason that supervisors “don’t have time” is because they have not made [...]