Category: Opinion

With the next General Elections to be held in 2015, the government is going all out in its efforts to curb the huge deficit, bringing the issue of debt into sharp focus. Banks, who were beneficiaries of the state’s largesse, are now making concerted efforts to generate profits that would help them repay their debts. On the other hand, the tough economic situation has seen a steep increase in personal debt.

Gordon Tredgold, author of ‘Leadership: It’s a marathon not a sprint’ explains what leadership is and explains how you can integrate this skill into your business.

Extrovert or introvert – Excessor, Repressor or Intellectual. How will your personality type influence your choice of Christmas celebration?

Do you have someone at work who consistently triggers you? Doesn’t listen? Takes credit for work you’ve done? Wastes your time with trivial issues? Acts like a know-it-all? Can only talk about himself?

Corporate mergers and acquisitions have even higher failure rates than marriages and that over half of them have destroyed shareholder value. According to research from KPMG, 90% of mergers and acquisitions fail, compared with around 40% – 50% of marriages.

When running a business you will need to keep an eye on several things, one of which being the office you and your staff will work in. Offices alone aren’t exactly striking, hence why we shape and edit them to our specific wants and needs, depending on the ethos of the company.

From the praise being heaped upon us over the past weeks there could be little doubt that the freelancing community is an indispensable and increasingly important driving force behind our nation’s recovery.

The first port of call for budding business owners is finance. Traditionally, there are three routes that you can go down; personal investment – either your own money or that of relatives – a bank loan or for those who have a fairly substantial pension pot, using a SSAS to take a loan back.

I spent eight of the formative years of my life in California – often trekking between university and work in Los Angeles and friends and family in Silicon Valley.

Although they are all blessed with extraordinary prowess, superheroes possess a power that doesn’t get enough attention. In my view, it is their entrepreneurial spark that elevates them from circus-acts to gifted heroes.

Let these factors creep into the process and you’ll most certainly suffer from cloudy judgment.

In the 1930s, Hedwig von Restorff, a German psychologist, made an important, though not very counterintuitive, discovery: things that somehow stand out are remembered more easily than typical things.

A lot of entrepreneurs think they can ramp up on marketing to accelerate growth and just see how it goes. They make the mistaken assumption that they can always switch off and go back to the nice organically drive growth they were enjoying before. That’s a mistake.

Steve Jobs. Jeff Bezos. Martha Stewart. Bill Gates. Larry Ellison. Jack Welch. Successful. Visionary. Competitive. Demanding. And each with a well-deserved reputation for raising their voices. They yelled. Yelling was an integral part of their leadership and management styles.