The Hennessy Group

In 2008, an executive challenged his people to write down two or three “unmentionables”: issues that were brewing at the water cooler, but were too touchy to raise to management.  One person expressed his concern about a lack of understanding of the differences between selling to businesses and selling to consumers.  He used the [...]

Very few companies lead the market in everything unless they do only one thing.  Instead, most companies lead in one area, maintain parity in most, and lag in one or two.
Trouble starts when when you’ve missed something new altogether.  One example is mobility and social media, which are now blending.
The market no longer looks [...]

If 100 percent of your meeting time is billable to a client, then you can stop reading.  Everyone else will gain a new appreciation for the evil of business meetings.  If you think “evil” is a bit too strong, consider:

They break your working day into small, incoherent pieces on a schedule incompatible with the [...]

Doesn’t it seem like a century ago that most businesses abandoned business attire for some sort of prefixed “casual” wear? It seems like that to me.   Is it possible that our relaxed dress code contributed to our relaxed attitudes toward business ethics, frugality, and risk?  I think so.
Only a decade ago, I was required [...]

Most companies bore the pants off everyone:  employees, customers, management, the public.  Everyone but the board room and C-suite.
Why is this?
What makes most companies insufferable bores?   The petty rules and conditions they build to protect some people from the ideas of others.  In other words, senior managers.
Here’s an example:  Most companies use some internally [...]