Monthly Archive: December 2010

Imagine going into a downtown Whole Foods and buying lettuce and herbs that were picked only hours earlier. And what if they were 100% pesticide free, took only a fraction of the water to grow, and didn’t pollute the environment by having to be trucked in from long distances?
A company in the UK has invented a technology that is making all this happen. Take a look at their first installation outside of London, England. institute B is now well underway to commercializing this high-density urban growing technology across North America.

Check out the video!

Hey managers, if your corporate culture is toxic, look in the mirror.

An organization’s corporate culture is the manifestation of the unresolved issues of its leadership team. Look around you. Is your workplace full of office politics, information hoarding, negative water cooler conversation, and back talk? If so, chances are strong you are, unintentionally or not, the root cause.

If your environment is toxic, you are wasting money compensating for a lack of shared vision and effective communication. Your customer experience is surely affected and if so, this impacts negatively on your company’s growth potential. Plus it just isn’t any fun. This toxicity even extends to those managers who develop a team of yes people. In my opinion, the only way to fuel a high growth company is via a positive environment full of idea sharing and feedback. Read more »

In 2001 a group of a dozen of wide eyed bushy tailed employees of upstart lululemon athletica sat in a living room and declared that Nike would become their main competitor. Although at face value this may not seem surprising, it quickly becomes unreasonable when you learn that at the time the company had one retail store and less than $1 million in sales as compared to Nike’s top line of $9.5 Billion at the time. Not even a blip on their radar in 2002, lululemon became in Nike’s mind their principal competitor in women’s apparel by 2007. In only five years lululemon grew from that one store in Vancouver to a 70 store chain with sales of $270 million and one mega NASDAQ IPO. Read more »