• Articles and Books,  Small Business

    6 Ways to Win Friends and Influence People as a New Manager

    My latest piece on Inc.com was 6 Ways to Win Friends and Influence People as a New Manager It starts a bit like: Call it the New Sheriff in Town Syndrome. You’re a new manager at an established company or your own startup. You think of yourself as a fixer, so you quickly set out to implement changes or new processes, often bringing in ideas from your old company. Whoops. While making improvements should be the goal of any manager, you need to be careful. It’s easy to come across as over-aggressive and disruptive, and you could end up alienating many of your colleagues. To read more…

  • Articles and Books,  Business

    Let IT Make Your Business More Tech Savvy

    My latest Inc.com piece is up and available at https://www.inc.com/charles-edge/5-ways-your-it-staff-can-make-your-business-more-tech-savvy.html. It starts a bit like this (or totally like this as the case may be): Remember Nick Burns, the “company computer guy” played by Jimmy Fallon on “Saturday Night Live”? IT people have long been fixtures in the office (though hopefully seldom as grumpy as Nick). However, their jobs have been radically changed by two trends — the cloud and consumerization. To read more…

  • Articles and Books

    Perfecting Your Sales Pitch

    My latest Inc.com piece is up. This one focuses on perfecting your sales pitch. It starts as follows: It’s hard to make a sale if you have a lousy sales pitch. Delivering fresh pitches that allow your product or service to stand out from the others is job number one in sales. So how do you incite interest rather than yawns? Here are six simple tips. You can find the rest of the article here: http://www.inc.com/charles-edge/how-to-pitch-your-product-in-6-easy-steps.html.

  • Articles and Books

    @Inc Article on Employee Retention

    I’m not sure this format is working for me, but I’m still doing my initial series of articles for Inc. The latest is tips on employee retention, available at http://www.inc.com/charles-edge/how-to-keep-your-best-employees-from-walking-out-the-door.html