Advice for CEOs

Emerging growth companies must climb a steep hill to penetrate their market, grow revenue, and attain profitability. Setbacks, disappointment, and frustration are common occurrences. The company founder is driven by a vision — and by the upside that comes from owning some or all of the company. But most employees are only getting a paycheck — and the chance to get in on the ground floor of what they hope one day will be a fast growing company. Employee morale is an indispensable driver of a company’s success. It boosts confidence, commitment, and productivity. A drop in employee morale can quickly lead to disappointment and resentment — and an exodus of employees without whom the company can’t function. We asked Newport partners how successful CEO’s they know respond to setbacks.

Note: John Isaza, Esq. is the co-author of this blog. Content, including records and information, has become a pervasive and strategic part of companies — large and small.1 Records and information are commonly considered an important and strategic asset of any organization. 2Yet many companies treat this asset as, at best, a cost center — an important issue but not an urgent one. But this may be changing. A sense of urgency about content is growing. The regulatory environment is demanding accountability for the management of content. At the same time, liability for failing to control unfettered information raises the stakes tremendously. This blog explores this problem in a bit more detail and proposes an approach to manage it.

Millennials are the up and coming generation of employees. They tend to be better educated and more culturally diverse than earlier generations—also notorious for leaving jobs when they feel dissatisfaction with their work and the opportunities it offers. What should your company do to keep this new generation engaged and motivated?

Every business today has to constantly consider how to leverage technology to help them run more efficiently, reach their targeted market growth, and enhance what makes them unique. Technology typically acts as a facilitator of competitive advantage -- for example of an innovative business model that is a source of advantage -- rather than an advantage in itself. Sometimes companies feel that adopting the latest technology is “table stakes” to allow them to at least keep pace with what competitors are doing. What is it that enables some entrepreneurial companies to use technology for competitive advantage, while others struggle to establish a distinctive technology direction? Some of our expert partners weighed in on this question. Here are the factors they see playing the biggest role:

Nothing is more important for a company than having a clear value proposition that explains why customers should buy its products or services instead of buying them from a competitor or buying products and services in another category altogether. We asked some of our partners to weigh in on how they see companies focusing explicitly on their value propositions. Here’s what they had to say:

Your Customer is Never Right To be successful in the marketplace, companies must balance the desires of current customers with a bold vision of where their technology and service could take their customers.