By Emilie Totten

Women may soon  find a new route into the C-suite, through the growing importance of the chief marketing technology officer role, or CMTO.Read More

I’ve been a business owner and consultant for nearly 25 years.  Over the years, I’ve become a keen observer of businesses and love to learn what makes them tick.  I find myself filling out a mental evaluation card on just about any business I encounter. I’m particularly inquisitive about what makes a company great (or not) and what the key drivers of the business are. In other words, how companies achieve excellence.

Every once in a while I encounter a business that really catches my attention for the excellence they exude.  I know for a fact that excellence doesn’t happen by accident. So, when I see an organization behaving in this manner, I immediately start looking for root causes and asking questions:

• What have they done to make themselves different?
• What is their hiring philosophy?
• Do they have discipline?
• What is their company culture?
• Are they really successful or just pretending?
• Are they investing in building something extraordinary or just playing for a payout?

If you learn to look for the nuances, the answers to these questions are often right in front of you.

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Doing more with less, overwhelming expectations and fast paced deadlines seem to be more the norm in the work place.   Sometimes we work so hard that we forget to take some time to rest, rejuvenate, look around and appreciate.  It’s very easy to think of our work lives as a continuum defined by problems we’ve faced, when it could easily be thought of as a series of challenges which have been overcome, i.e. successes.Read More

by John Toepfer

I spent time at the Chicago Auto Show this weekend.  I enjoy getting a look at all the latest feats in automotive engineering; the new Corvette’s design, the economy of the plug-in Focus Eco, the luxury of the Jaguar XF.  Finding a billion dollars of R&D on display for close inspection under one roof is pretty close to heaven for me.  I also enjoy studying merchandising and marketing of cars.  There is enormous effort put into the presentations at this show and what we see tells us a lot about the manufacturers and the market.

As I wandered the rows of gleaming and carefully positioned vehicles, I couldn’t help but notice how many of those pristine polished paint jobs were besmirched by smudgy hand prints – sometimes in the oddest places too. (Timmy, did you have to smear your churro on that rocker panel?)

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