It takes a conscious, concerted, and persistent decision to create an “us”… I’m blessed to speak professionally for a number of corporations, associations, and academic forums these days, in conjunction with the release a few days ago of my new book, Co-Create: How Your Business Will Profit from Innovative and Strategic Collaboration. If you come up to me after one of these speeches and ask a question about improving the success of your career, I’m going to do my best to answer it. We will probably exchange business cards, and if you make a follow-up request, I will certainly honor it.

Think about the most competitive job markets, the ones in which the people you want to hire are already happily employed and earning top salaries. They spend their days avoiding calls from recruiters. A phone pitch will never win them over. Instead, you need to start a conversation. To do this successfully, you probably will need to engage top-level executives to have one-on-one conversations about what matters most to each person.

You can get away with being a leader who is not beloved — maybe not even liked — if you can get stuff done. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for decent people to start sliding slowly towards the dead zone. The dead zone is where professionals who are both unpleasant and ineffective go to watch their careers wither away. All it takes is for you to become a bit tired, disgruntled, or disorganized. At first, you might only be slightly less pleasant and slightly less effective. But over the course of a few years, these negatives become more marked.

Taken seriously, new relationships come with significant obligations… Recently I was being interviewed about my new book, Co-Create, and was asked, “How do you keep your thinking fresh?” My answer was, “I have an insatiable drive to #NeverStopGrowing.” (Yes, I did the “hashtag” thing with my fingers.) Afterward, I kept…

The larger your business grows, the further away a single client’s experience seems… A few years ago, Mark Hoplamazian, CEO of Hyatt Hotels, spoke at the Skift Global Forum about bringing a new perspective to the hospitality industry. He described an insight triggered by a stay in a friend’s century-old house in Connecticut. As the two of them ascended the old wooden staircase and walked down a long hallway past the master bedroom, Hoplamazian couldn’t help noticing how loud the creaking of the old plank floors was.

“Economic advantage … is shifting not to how many relationships we have, but to deep loyal relationships.” The 2016 Fortune-Time Global Forum — held at the Vatican — attracted many of the business world’s most accomplished leaders. …

Here’s a message you need to deliver repeatedly to your sales force: Stop selling when they come across marginal or unprofitable prospects. The truth is, many sales professionals are like little kids in search of dessert: anything with sugar will do, except for sales you need to replace “sugar” with…

It should never be hard for your clients to tell if you are making a difference. If you charge $10,000 for a consulting project and deliver $12,000 of value, your client might well decide it wasn’t worth their time and effort to bring you on board.But …

Innovators and leaders tend to fall in love with their own strategy, in part because they developed the strategy. But to everyone else, such visions often sound like this: And if your team doesn’t understand that strategy, you can’t expect them to execute it. Pictures can change everything. Not just because they look good, but because transforming your strategy into images forces you — and everyone else — to figure out…