Cassy was an employee of a nonprofit who had been at her job 5 years. She came to me because she felt that organization she was working for didn’t value her and was upset because others had been promoted but she had not.

By time we began to work together she had already written her resignation letter and asked me to review it with her. Her letter was not an angry one. She even thanked organization for training she had received that had enabled her to have some notable achievements.

After I read it I asked her to think of one skill that she hoped she would get from her next position and weave it into letter so they would know why she was leaving. She chose to highlight leadership skills and in letter said she was leaving to find a position that would allow her to develop her leadership skills.

You can probably guess what happened? The organization offered her a job managing a team immediately. Her manager said he thought she didn’t want to be a manager. The immediate offer was because he didn’t want to lose her!

The third step of my Value Program © is Leverage and by leverage I mean a small shift or change that can produce big results. The small change Cassy made to her letter got a much bigger result than she had even dreamed about!

The word leverage comes from word lever. I always picture a big rock with a big metal bar under it. If you push a little on metal bar you can move rock. Without big metal bar (the lever), rock is just too big for you to move.

Clients often come to me because their business isn’t building fast enough or their job or career search is bogged down. There is a lot to do when you are starting to build a business, practice or a career. Results may come slowly. Leverage is key. As you look at all choices of steps to take you will want to ask yourself, “What small step can I take that will produce a big result?

Of course there are an infinite number of answers depending on you and your business. In my experience though following three offer leverage to most people:

Do you want your own fully programmable ERP? - Part 1

By J.C.Melo

We are in a transition phase in Managerial Administration models of any company or Government, because three factors are summing for that:

1. The new powerful business Information Technologies and its more and more smaller costs, like ERP, CRM, BI, etc.,

2. The creativity of new MBA to generate value and its corresponding engineering - for example, Feedback Control System - in administrative and managerial fields,

3. Several different layers in companies in what refers to its managerial and administrative automation levels.

This created not very orthodox solutions, and one of them is installation of a Front-End System above Transational System already existent in your company that - by any reason - cannot be substituted by a "pure" ERP System.

Inside existent tools and for reasons that will be exposed, we choiced IBM Lotus Notes software for that purpose, briefly Notes as it's widely known.

The Notes has following programmable structures that can be used to change and to use in a Front-End System of any online managerial or accounting System that already exists in your company, like ACCPAC/SBT, Macola and others 150 companies:

- It can be integrated into Internet, to enlarge area of DAS/DDC functions at regional, national or world levels.

- He has so called Replication, that allows Head office of a company in New York to change an only field in its local database, and automatically and in Real-Time that same field assumes same value in local database of a Branch in Chicago or Tokyo. And vice-versa. That means to have a national database - or regional or world - and not only local. This Replication can be programmed, a field or a group of fields can be Replicated or not, in agreement with goals of company.

- Theoretically that would create problems - for example, simultaneously an operator in New York change content of local field "m" and an operator in Chicago change content of its same local field "m" - but Lotus Notes will solved this problem in a transparent way to both users with use of Replication, and conflict doesn't exist.