WILL YOUR COMPANY’S REPUTATION GET TWITTERED AWAY?   By Liz Alexander, Ph.D. In some industries, facing a crisis is an everyday risk of doing business, which is why we might have expected more from the CEOs of British Petroleum (BP), Carnival Corporation, and Toyota Motor Corporation with respect to crisis management. Yet gaffe-prone Tony Hayward [...]

WHAT FORWARD THINKING CEOS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MANAGING IT COSTS   By Raja Pabba and Rakesh Singh The difficulty in managing IT costs for large enterprises has increased in the past 15 to 20 years because of the complexity inherent in managing IT Systems, which includes proliferation of sourcing IT services from multiple vendors, [...]

UNDERSTANDING THE SALES PROCESS BEHIND YOUR CUSTOMER’S WALLS By Randy Meriwether As a business executive, the lack of closed business stays either at the top, or close to the top, of the most frustrating experiences in a day to day sales operation. It is especially maddening when it appears there are many opportunities that are [...]

THE ART OF SUPPRESSING THE NEED TO “FIX” EVERYTHING By Joel Trammell I’m lazy and I am not ashamed to admit it. I think it makes me a better CEO. How can someone who has built successful organizations from the ground up be lazy? Aren’t startups famous for their around the clock work hours and [...]

5 THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE CHOOSING YOUR COMPANY’S CLOUD By Peter S. Vogel The CIO, or whomever is in charge of storing and accessing digital information may be saying it is time to use cloud computing. CEOs of both large and small companies who do not have deep technology experience may not really understand the [...]

WHY INVESTING IN THE MILLENNIAL GENERATION NOW IS SMART LEADERSHIP By Sharon Birkman Fink It’s time for businesses and other organizations to stop trying to recruit leaders and instead to start building them. Companies should discover that the best leaders are invested in the organization through more than just stock options. They understand the culture [...]

THREE CRITICAL SECURITY TRENDS EVERY CEO NEEDS TO KNOW By Theresa Schwab Recently a manufacturing company came to me wanting assistance with their network. Apparently, the company who sold the network equipment was only good at installation, but not as good with supporting the equipment. Installing security equipment without properly configuring it is like driving a [...]

DON’T MESS WITH TEXANS (OR ANYONE ELSE, FOR THAT MATTER) By David J. Lineman One of the challenges to managing a business today is the growing list of regulations. With the dramatic rise in identity-theft and cybercrime in general, data protection laws have been popping up at the Federal level and in all 50 states. [...]

HOW CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS ARE CHANGING BUSINESS,COMMERCE AND THE ECONOMY By Jim Brazell Sociologist Marshall McLuhan once said, “Each major period in history takes its character from the medium of communication used most widely at the time.” The emerging communications medium of the 21st century is robotics. Rather than walking, talking robots as we usually imagine, [...]

HOW SMALL BUSINESSES CAN GAIN A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE USING CLOUD COMPUTING By James Higginbotham Small businesses are using cloud computing to find new ways to compete with larger companies. The challenge is to understand what cloud computing is and how it can be used as a competitive advantage. What is Cloud Computing? At its core, [...]

STRATEGIES TO HELP CEOS CREATE A FOCUSED AND COHESIVE COMPANY DURING AN IPO By Lois Melbourne Changes within any company – office relocation or a C-level change – create natural uncertainty among employers and employees alike. That’s a given. But a long-time private company that becomes public is filled with entirely new challenges and repercussions. [...]

WHY CEOs NEED TO BE THINKING GREEN ENERGY NOW, NOT LATER By Mark  Kapner, PE and Virginia Palmer, Ph.D Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you DO KNOW for sure that just ain’t so.” This gem seems to apply to the conventional thinking about [...]

MAKING STEM FOR K-12 MORE ACCESSIBLE VIA MENTORSHIP AND CREATIVE ENGAGEMENT By Dr. James Truchard The National Academy of Engineering recently published the 14 Engineering Grand Challenges, authored by a select group of our country’s most esteemed scientific and engineering minds. The engineering grand challenges lay out the 14 most important and significant issues our world [...]

THE INTEGRAL AND PRACTICAL ROLE TWO-YEAR COLLEGES PLAY IN HIGHER EDUCATION By Dr. Richard Carpenter If I told you that you had a choice of paying either $18,514 or $28,516 for a bachelor’s degree from a Texas public college or university and that you had a better chance of graduating with the lower priced option, [...]

HOW TO LEVERAGE HUMAN CAPITAL IN THE NEW ECONOMY By Christine Reyes Within the next six months, top performers – in particular – will be polishing up their resumes and looking for work environments that will help them develop their skills and careers in exchange for increased productivity and engagement. During the economic downturn workers [...]

IDENTIFYING TALENT CAN TURN CAPTURED DATA INTO REALIZED OPPORTUNITIES By Michael J. Penney The McKinsey & Company study, “Big data: The next frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity,” reaches two conclusions business leaders will quickly realize. First, there are huge opportunities available for improving marketing in organizations with the use of data analytics; and second, [...]

THE SPARK TO GREAT INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP By Carol Thompson I live in Austin, Texas, a city with more than its fair share of entrepreneurs. And while entrepreneurs are most often known as innovators, I think they share another important quality: PASSION. Some are passionate about creating a breakthrough product or service that solves [...]

TURNING LIFE’S SETBACKS INTO TANGIBLE PROFESSIONAL SUCCESS A Commentary By Veronica Edwards I literally failed first grade because, according to my teacher, I wasted valuable classroom time daydreaming out the window, talked too much and was unable to color within the lines. My future career prospects at the age of seven were bleak. I did [...]

KEEPING THE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT TANK FULL By Mark Frein Every decade seems to bring with it a new term for employee satisfaction. The term of the last 10 years is “engagement,” usually defined as an emotional commitment by an employee to put in extra effort. We don’t want employees to simply be satisfied – we [...]