Too often, business owners launch into the new year without a clear plan. Here are 6 ingredients for making an effective strategic plan.

By casting an inspiring, practical picture of what you want for your organization, you can reap these 3 defining benefits.

Vision and strategy are both important. But there is a priority to them. Vision always comes first. Always. If you have a clear vision, you will eventually attract the right strategy.

The turn of the year is always a good time to evaluate what’s working in our lives, what’s not, and make any changes that will start us down a better path. As we pause and reflect on where we’ve been and where we want to go, we normally have a sense of what to do. […]

Last year, my business revenue grew 62 percent. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it presents a whole new set of problems—problems I didn’t face last year. This is where many entrepreneurs and business leaders get stuck. Let me explain. The key to rapid growth is innovation. You develop a new product […]

D-Day is known as a great victory for the allied forces, the beginning of the end for the Nazis as over 150,000 troops pushed into Europe in the first wave of an invasion by sea. But it easily could have gone the other way. We can learn a great deal from the difference. A draft […]

I decided to change my email newsletter strategy last month. For years, I sent the entire blog post in the body of the email. We used a custom template that included many of the design elements from my blog. For a long time, that served us well. But we are no longer doing that. Instead, […]

Most of us start pursuing our goals with great focus and intensity, but roadblocks inevitably surface before we’re far down the road. We might be tempted to quit, or simply redouble our efforts in an effort to scale the obstacle, but the secret may be tossing our strategy out the window and trying an alternate […]

I create a lot of content across my blog, podcast, online courses, books, and membership site. And sometimes readers and other content creators wonder about my strategy. The other day I heard from a reader who not only follows my blog and podcast, but is also a Platform University member and follows #VirtualMentor. When he […]

Do you have a long-term delegation strategy? This is the secret to moving more into “the zone” and getting out of those activities you don’t enjoy or don’t do well. Recently, I recorded two podcasts on the subject of delegation. The first dealt with the principles of delegation. The second suggested how you might delegate […]

Why do leaders exist? This is perhaps one of the most simple yet profound questions we can ask about leadership. Oddly, I am not sure I have ever heard anyone address it.

At Thomas Nelson, our core ideology is comprised of four key elements. These are distinguishable but inseparable. It’s a little bit like talking about an orange. You can distinguish its shape, its color, its size, and its smell and taste. However, you can’t do away with any of these attributes and still have an orange. So it is with your organization’s core ideology.

As leaders, you and I are called upon to make hundreds if not thousands of decisions over the course of a year. A few are monumental. Some are consequential. Most are trivial. However, I would boil down the most important decisions I make into three categories

In the Western literary tradition, the silver bullet was the only weapon that could destroy certain types of monsters. As a result, it became a metaphor for a singular solution that solves a giant problem.