Top Guide Posts this week discuss Naughty Lists, Lies and Doing Good. Enjoy!

Are You On The Naughty List?

Are you on the naughty list this year?

Perhaps you didn't hire enough elves to take advantage of business opportunities.

Or maybe the elves you hired were't able to make the products the market wanted.

Or maybe the elves got bad direction from their directors and you ended up with products destined for the Island of Misfit toys.

Whatever the case may be, Due North can help you get back on the nice list in 2025.

Click here to schedule a meeting.

Is Your Strategy A Throne Of Lies?

In my career as both a marketer and executive recruiter, I have seen many instances where business strategy has been built on faulty assumptions and bad data.

And yes, outright lies!

The results are always the same.

Failure!It's like a building with a bad foundation. You cannot expect it to last long if the foundation isn't solid.

Business leaders need encourage their teams to provide the best possible data and challenge the assumptions business strategies are based upon.

And not just "go along to get along" because that is the most common kind of lie.

And if your team cannot do this, you need a new team.

Your career is on the line and like a building with a faulty foundation, it can all come crumbling down.

Are You Jacob Marley?

In a Christmas Carol, the dead former business partner of Scrooge is doomed to walk the earth seeing what he may have done to help mankind.

But now he has no power to do so. And that is his punishment for his bad deeds here on earth.

Those deeds made him a great business man and a horrible person.

So he was doing well but he wasn't doing good.

This reminds me of the former CEO of Cargill who spoke at my b-school graduation.

He spoke about the temptations that would come to us as freshly minted MBAs.

The temptation to make a quick buck at someone else's expense.

The temptation to sabotage someone else's career to get ahead.

The temptation to deceive your customers.

And so on.

He cautioned that if you only focus on making money, you will likely do things that are not good. So he said "Ask yourself, not am I doing well but am I doing good?"

So, are you doing good?

Chris Gustanski – Founder and Lead Talent Guide

Chris is a classically trained marketer with over a decade of executive search experience. He moved into recruiting because he was someone that was frequently recruited and was tired of recruiters hounding him to consider roles they didn’t understand, and he wasn’t interested in pursuing. He was determined to disrupt Executive Search to deliver a better result and experience for companies and the commercial talent they need.?After over a decade seeing the dysfunction in executive search firms large and small, he formed Due North Executive Search in collaboration with his wife Amie.

To learn more about how Due North can help you build World Class Commercial teams click here to schedule a meeting.