Really? You want to start your own business? Five steps to avoid failure…

Five steps to avoid business failure

Times are always tough somewhere. Countries, regions and industries all have economic cycles. Right now almost everyone is hurting due to COVID-19. Economists and governments are expecting many job losses to be permanent. Unemployment is forecast to remain high for some years to come. That’s encouraging (or forcing) many of us to rethink our future […]

Music – Does It Help Or Hinder Productivity?

Are you working from home now? Are you hearing lots of sounds and noises that are alien to your workplace… kids playing, neighbors arguing, dogs barking? These and similar noises can kill productivity. As an antidote, many of us like to crank up the music as ‘white noise’. But is it? Or is it just […]

Survival and revival: Retailers need to prepare for two e-commerce waves

Wave 1 - COVID-19 - caught us off-guard.

Are you one of the countless small business owners wondering how you can survive the COVID-19 crisis? Will your staff return? What about your customers? If you’re in retail, the following article by Jane Cohen, a Partner at KPMG Strategy, is a five minute read that may help you to navigate the next few months. […]

Learn How You Can Be More Productive When Working From Home…

Six tips for beating distractions and procrastination! My working career spans 50 years. For at least 30 of those, I’ve worked from a home office. For the last 20 years, I’ve lead a team of focused writers, social media specialists and coders… all from my home office. And they all work from home too! It […]

Seven valuable lessons Western retailers can learn from China

The baby products section of an RT-Mart hypermarket, backed by Alibaba, in Shanghai. Alibaba has applied the "new retail" concept to some 400 brick-and-mortar stores in Chinese cities.PHOTO: BLOOMBERG

From facial recognition payments to super fast delivery and even in-store childcare services, there is a lot that Western countries could learn from the ‘new retail’ concept in China. ‘New Retail’ The term ‘new retail’, coined in 2016 by Jack Ma, Alibaba founder, describes the future of retail in China. It’s a future focused on […]

How to Transition and Thrive into Remote Working

Working from Home

Working from home can be a big benefit to employees, offering them flexibility and freedom to take charge of their own time.
But there are challenges that perhaps don’t seem obvious at first glance.

Huge success in business is largely based on luck

Success in business may be very dependent on luck.

Chengwei Liu, Associate Professor of Strategy and Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick Bestselling business books promise to teach you the winning formula and reveal the secrets of success. But the inconvenient truth is that exceptional successes in business are largely based on luck. No rule exists for achieving exceptional performance because it usually […]

You may not love them but your business needs them!

Everyone loves a helpful, cheerful worker… their manager, the owner and the customers. After all, enthusiastic optimists are wonderful colleagues. Reliable, pretty much trouble and conflict free, they can always be counted on. But are they great for your business? Are they really the asset you think they are? According to organizational psychologist and Wharton […]

Work From Home – Seven Simple Steps to Ensure Success

Tired of the commute? Want – or need –  to spend more time with your children? Work better at night or early morning than you do during the 9 to 5 stint? Maybe it’s time to work from home. Today’s technology means that you can interact with others efficiently and effectively from anywhere in the […]

Seven winning qualities a start-up team needs to succeed

Start-up mantra - together we can

The future belongs to small, innovative, agile entrepreneurs. Passion and perseverance will create many opportunities for those with their eyes and minds open. I came across this article from the Techstars blog. Given Techstars great track-record for bringing start-ups to market, I thought you might find it useful too. Running a “city program” accelerator at […]