Articles tagged with : leadership

Suggestions from readers | More favorite business books to start off 2016

At the end of 2015, I asked a number of my favorite business development, capture and proposal management, and leadership gurus for their recommendations of “must-read” and all-time favorite business books. Everyone generously provided a plethora of suggestions—many of which I'm now pouring through while recovering from the Blizzard of '16 (watching the 15' snow pile that used to be my car slowly melt and hoping I can drive the car before March)! After publishing the list, I received a number of additional suggestions from readers. Here they are for your business reading pleasure with links to Amazon.com so you can learn more and hopefully find some new favorites. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath (recommended by Jayme Sokolow). Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek (recommended by David Stearman). The Challenger Sale: Taking...

From the experts: Favorite business books to start off 2016

BD, capture and proposal management, and leadership gurus share their must reads

At the end of 2015, I asked a number of my favorite business development, capture and proposal management, and leadership gurus for their recommendations of “must-read” and all-time favorite business books. Everyone generously provided a plethora of suggestions—many of which have taken up residence on my iPad or added to my UPS driver’s busy holiday deliveries! Here are their suggestions with links to Amazon.com so you can learn more and hopefully find some new favorites. Please feel free to send your own suggestions to me to share with everyone in a future post (BWingate@LohfeldConsulting.com). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen Covey (recommended by Mike Parkinson). A really good dictionary and thesaurus (recommended by Ruth Turman). Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by Kim, W. Chan and Renee Mauborgne. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA...

How to bring a proposal team to a single POV? Ask the Proposal Doctor

Dear Proposal Doctor, As a newly-accredited APMP member (Foundation Level), I appreciate the importance of making everything customer-focused. That is a big part of the curriculum. I get that. Here is the problem: our RFP has been out for several weeks, and everyone on my team has a different idea of who the customer really is and what they really want. This divergence of opinion is making it very hard to come to closure on important parts of our solution that should have been decided a long time ago. Some people on the proposal team are senior, with a lot of expertise and many years of experience. Others are more junior, but in closer contact with people likely to be influential in the final decision. The discussions go in circles with no clear conclusion or resolution. At this rate, not only will we never get done, we will never get...

Fed up with proposal politics? Ask Proposal Doctor

Dear Proposal Doctor, My proposal has become a hornet’s nest. The capture manager is intensely unpopular. She makes arbitrary and often unwise decisions with zero transparency. People have to go behind her back to get her decisions reversed because she will not engage in discussion. Although this could be a unifying force, instead the proposal team has broken up into factions, each trying to curry favor with senior management in an effort to get the capture manager replaced with a candidate of choice. The amount of politicking is mind-boggling. It is no wonder that no one is able to meet any proposal deadlines—they are all too busy plotting and scheming. It’s a demoralizing atmosphere, needless to say, all the more so because the behavior makes it less and less likely that we can win. As a proposal manager, my power is limited. Yet I am dying to do something to...