Author View (Bud Bilanich)

Brand-Building Wisdeom from Bud Bilanich, The Common Sense Guy As a small business owner whose brand is me, I recognize the importance of personal branding. I am a keynote speaker, executive coach, organization effectiveness consultant, and author. I am my business; therefore, my brand needs to speak for me. When I decided to brand myself, I began by asking everybody I know a simple question. “When you think of me, what is the first thing that comes to mind?” An overwhelming number of people said, “Your common sense approach to business and life.” My first reaction was, “Uh oh, common sense doesn’t make for much more...

Your brand is how people think of you. Tom Peters says that “a brand is a trust mark, it’s shorthand, it’s a sorting device.” Think of the well-known brands that you know - Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Dell computers, iPods - all of them are shorthand for a product. When you think cola, you probably think Coke or Pepsi. When you think computers, Dell probably comes to mind. When you think portable music players, iPod is probably at the top of the list. Some brands are so strong that they have become a generic name for a type of product - think Aspirin, the more...

Insights from Bud Bilanich, The Common Sense Guy As a small business owner whose brand is me, I recognize the importance of personal branding. I am a keynote speaker, executive coach, organization effectiveness consultant, and author. I am my business; therefore, my brand needs to speak for me. When I decided to brand myself, I began by asking everybody I know a simple question. “When you think of me, what is the first thing that comes to mind?” An overwhelming number of people said, “Your common sense approach to business and life.” My first reaction was, “Uh oh, common sense doesn’t make for much more...

I saw an amazing piece in USA Today just a few days ago. It was in the lower left corner of the front page of the business section called USA Today "Snapshots."Here's the exact quote:"Most employers don't share company strategy - Of the companies with a formal strategy in place, 70% describe their performance as better than their competition, compared with 27% of those without it, according to a survey. Percentage of companies that tell their employees what the strategy is: 95% don't tell, 5% tell."The survey, entitled "Making Strategy Execution a Competitive Advantage," was conducted by the Cognos/Palladium Group and more...

Skillful execution of the things that matter is one of the success principles I stress in my book 4 Secrets of High Performing Organizations. "The things that matter" are the key words in the preceding statement. The things that matter vary from business to business. A case study I'd like to discuss today is Cucina Colore, an Italian restaurant in Cherry Creek North in Denver. What matters in a restaurant? Good food and good service certainly. But these days, good food and good service are a given for any restaurant just to remain in business. The food at Cucina Colore is more...

The last few weeks have been tough for CEOs. Patricia Dunn resigned as the Chairperson of Hewlett Packard. The pretexting scandal - that arose from her spying on her board members- got out of hand. Peter Dolan was fired as CEO of Bristol Myers Squibb. Mr. Dolan was running a company that was already in hot water - operating under a deferred prosecution agreement with the US Attorney - and sanctioned actions in which BMS overloaded wholesalers with inventory to meet quarterly sales targets.To paraphrase an old hamburger commercial, where's the ethics?In my book 4 Secrets of High Performing Organizations, I more...