Business owners tend to underestimate the cost of recruiting and retaining the talent needed to grow. In 2022, it was reported that companies spend an average of over $4,683 and about an eighth of the financial year for recruitment and training per new hire. Recruitment costs can add up, especially if your business has a high turnover rate.

Losing top talent is clearly a cost that businesses have to consider. Perhaps the most immediate impact that losing employees has on an organization is lowering team morale. Employees enjoy having a friend or confidant in the workplace and seeing their colleague leave will weaken their connection to the organization. We saw this in mid-2021 as the “Great Resignation” had millions of employees leaving their jobs in droves. 

Previously, we’ve talked about how business agility can increase your company’s bottom line by:

• lowering costs through improving delivery processes, being more deliberate when choosing projects, as well as reducing churn

• increasing revenue through releasing high-quality products, creating feedback loops, and capitalizing opportunities

Today we'll talk about a third benefit: how business agility can increase your company’s bottom line by improving alignment with its customers. 

The next topic in our series on Business Agility for your bottom line is how the adoption of business agility practices can help increase your revenue. When it comes to building a profitable organization, a key goal is to increase revenue. Business agility helps an organization’s revenue growth in many ways, here are three:

• Put out high-quality products into the market

• Accelerate feedback loops to learn from customers

• Identify opportunities to capitalize on

Whenever the weather allows for it, we like to eat outside. At dinner time in our little courtyard in the city of Toronto, mother nature treated us to a beautiful scene. A few days later it turned into an invaluable lesson...

Two doves and a chick

A mourning dove landed on the fence, looking us straight in the eye. "What a wonderful sight," I thought, "I bet it's eyeing something on our plate." Without breaking the line of sight, the dove flew over to the side of the deck, even closer, testing the boundaries of its comfort zone.

"Roocoo! Roocoo!" A few minutes later mommy dove arrives, a little chick trailing inches behind her. The family reunited, they waggled to an open space a bit further away, while we watched the scene unfold at a safe distance. By now we realized that daddy had scouted the environment, checking our reactions to his proximity. He must have considered us safe, the little one would not be harmed.

To our surprise, the adults took off, leaving the little one alone. Stunne...

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was onto something when he said many years ago that

A saying as true today as it was for Heraclitus in Ancient Greece.

Today, businesses are impacted by change. Competitors introduce new capabilities or services, customers' loyalty shifts from brands towards value propositions, and new and exciting players disrupt the market altogether.

Recently I was on a call chatting with a group of senior leaders and the topic of work-life balance came up. More explicitly, how “now he seemed to have so much less time at the weekends”. Asking a few questions of the gentleman who brought this up identified that he had been newly promoted to a VP role.

Which got me thinking about the challenges as you move between roles in larger organizations. Expectations change as you move from an IC to manager to director to VP or above.

So I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts on the matter.