Do you find yourself competing on price? Do you often talk to a prospect, think you have made the sale and then they decide to shop around and buy based on price? If this sounds familiar, then potential clients probably perceive you as a commodity.

The importance of security and operational risk management has grown tremendously due to a variety of factors, including growing regulatory requirements, increasing security risk from insiders and the growing number of data security breaches. Financial institutions are currently responsible for customer and corporate security at three separate levels: the financial institution (including network and infrastructure all the way to employees and agents with access to data), service providers (outsourced functions must still include management responsibility by the financial institution) and consumers (consumer end-point vulnerabilities can jeopardize a financial institution's security).

Today’s highly competitive job market requires you to employ various strategies when conducting a job search.

The phrase ‘Intelligent Dressing™’ is intended to reflect the power of the clothes we wear and the way we present ourselves.

There are a number of courses available that teach you how to mirror body language in others and how to understand and mirror people's styles.

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Yet how often when teenagers are told to clean their rooms do they actually do it? Unless there is a very heavy threat attached to the order the chance of any teenager actually cleaning their room is practically zero.

Why Romania? Romania has become an attractive country for investors anxious to secure their place in a rapidly growing and increasingly stable economy, especially since it has been included in the European Union and NATO.

With over 93 commercial networks in operation, HSPA is likely to account for the majority of investment in global mobile broadband networks over the next five years, finds a new study by Arthur D.

Imagine this: You've worked for hours putting together the proposal that your prospective client requested and are finally ready to hit the send button.

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I recently became involved in a conversation with a researcher who belonged to the Performance Management Group of a leading business school. Being curious I had to ask exactly how it was that her group actually “Managed” performance. She told me that the work of her group centred around finding a way to measure the performance of the workforce such that when the workforce strayed from norms or targets laid down by management, management could use the collected data to drag the workforce’s performance back to what they believed it should be. I was struck by the peculiar nature of the object of their research.

Competitive Intelligence (CI) has yet to occupy a more strategic role in business, with its goals being more far-reaching than in recent years.

The scene opens in a master bedroom, when the sun is not out yet but ticklish feet are searching for lost slippers, as rested fingers stretch and get ready for a frantic tap dance on the keyboard.

Strategy plans are usually developed once every 2-5 years.

Suddenly, there is a new global tidal wave of change all over Asia.

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Desktop Virtualisation involves removing the Desktop PC from the desk, and centralising the hardware platform at a data centre to make it easier to manage and support.

In the private sector, you often hear this refrain when the pen is poised over the contract, and it’s usually followed by a request for a further price reduction.

The same old promises? As many in the IT arena readily admit, it’s easy to grow jaded with the hype that seems to surround the ‘latest’ technology.

The way that you give information can help foster goodwill and encourage the other side to reveal information that will help you reach the outcome you want.

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So just how capable are our leaders? Work at the Centre for High Performance Development (CHPD) has researched and assessed the key characteristics of successful leadership in this complex environment for the last 20 years.

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You are painfully aware that service-capability selling by a consulting organization no longer works.

Deming talks about how Extrinsic motivation--power, money, position--has replaced the intrinsic motivation that we all feel from birth--self esteem, dignity, cooperation, curiosity and a yearning for learning. At the beginning of our lives this intrinsic motivation is dominant but throughout our lives these qualities are crushed and destroyed by the way we are managed. Deming talks about how the way to change has to be a transformation to support this intrinsic motivation rather than what he called a patchwork approach. He said that if you find a fire you have to stamp it out, you can’t let it rage, but once it is out, once the damage has been made good, have you improved? Or have you simply returned to the old status Quo? The very simple message that Deming is trying to put across is that to release the power of the human resource we have to release the power that the workforce were born with, ignore the extrinsic motivators, and instead nurture the intrinsic values of the workforce. To do this we have to transform the way that we do business. We still have to put out fires but unless we start to address the cause of the fires then we will never progress.

But despite universal recognition that the business environment may experience upheaval, life sciences companies are frequently unclear about what their specific corporate priorities should be to secure success in the coming decade-let alone how these realities should be addressed. "Over the next decade, life sciences companies will have to reassess their strategies to achieve success," said Robert Go, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and DTT Life Sciences and Health Care Industry Group Leader.

The new report, Playing the Long Game: Global Asset Management 2006, examines the current state of the industry, offers a detailed analysis of the market for retirement assets, and outlines specific actions that asset managers can take if they seek both to raise profitability and achieve a leadership position in the industry. According to the report, which is based on a study of 28 national markets, the value of professionally managed assets -- those for which a management fee is paid -- grew by around 15 percent globally to $49.1 trillion in 2005, with capital inflows driven largely by growth in Europe and Asia.

The report also includes findings of a nationwide survey of 1,000 Americans about their perceptions of the U.S.

According to Atos Consulting, there is a need to accelerate this positive development, because SSCs can contribute to a more effective and efficient government.

There was a programme in the "In Business" series on Radio 4 recently that disturbed some very important ghosts. The programme, through the words of the Gurus of the last century, confirmed the basis of our disquiet with the conventional “Command and Control” model of management. All of the guests on the programme talked about releasing the ingenuity and creativity of the workforce through autonomy. As Peter Drucker said in a recorded interview, "Everybody says that People are our most important asset", then they go ahead and sack them anyway.” Peter said that he had been preaching the same message for the last 50 or 60 years, that "Human beings are the resource and not the cost", but that in all that time, all of his preaching has had almost no impact. A reason for this could be that the managers who understood the value of Peter’s words had no idea what to do with those words to make a practical difference to the effectiveness of their workforce. Employed Managers find their way to a position of management through a number of routes.

There are many kinds of one-dimensional negotiators.

Executive Summary Local players dominated domestic markets Until 1993, each country had its local credit insurer.

There are two aspects to the success of thought leadership: being heard and being read. Being heard The world’s largest 40 consulting firms have more than 3,500 documents on their websites which could be classed as thought leadership: that’s leaving out the much greater volume of marketing brochures, case studies and descriptions of services which are often labelled as such.

Certainly, there are problems with either extreme.

If you’re an experienced negotiator, you’re likely comfortable with working out the terms of an economic contract—bargaining for the best price, haggling over equity splits, ironing out detailed exit clauses, and so on.

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The Real ID Act requires that the states, by May 11, 2008, meet stringent requirements in confirming the identities of applicants seeking a driver's license or state identification card.

"Today, most retailers have a digital landfill of transaction data from their purchasing customers, but they need to look deeper at non-purchaser behaviour -- especially since non-purchasers are three times as likely to permanently abandon a retailer," says Pat Conroy, national managing principal of Deloitte's Consumer Business practice.

On Boxing Day 2005 these were the highly provocative questions that proved so effective in cutting through the alcohol induced fog and the ever present din of four excited children fighting over who was to wear the new set of fairy wings and who was sitting next to who to receive their traditional Boxing Day breakfast bacon roll. Boxing Day has a nasty habit of degenerating into turkey salad, the sound of in-laws drowning out The Sound of Music and the dubious task of present inspection to deduce who got what from whom ahead of the inevitable battle of wills over the merits of writing thank you notes. However this Boxing Day was proving to be different.

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Businesses must prioritise managing intellectual property and flexibility of work time and location to control organisational change over the next 10 years, according to the latest report from the Orange Future Enterprise coalition (OFEc).

The Western economies realized decades ago that small and medium enterprises are really the main drivers of the economy.

Chances are that you have found yourself—or expect to find yourself—involved in some sort of bargaining process.

Tomorrow's shoppers want a faster grocery shopping experience with more in-store technology and staff deployed differently to improve customer service.

The survey revealed that a sweeping majority (92 percent) of respondents see "industrialization” – the use of standardized operating and production platforms akin to those used by manufacturers – as a high priority today, and all respondents expect it to be a priority in the next three years.

“Talent,” a term that’s historically been used mostly as a synonym for a company’s entire workforce, is now being defined more precisely and narrowly, according to a new Towers Perrin survey of senior HR executives in North America.

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Diamond Management & Technology Consultants has released a white paper that says a two-phase approach to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) transition is necessary to achieve the business agility that SOA promises. "A company can totally disrupt its operations if it races towards SOA without getting its IT organization into shape first," said Chris Curran, Diamond's Chief Technology Officer.

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