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Adam DrakeBearing, presence, gravitas, and authority are all some words used to describe those who project confidence. When I am advising executives and leaders to help them with their teams, one of the topics of concern for them is confidence and how to gain it. Or at the very least, how to project confidence even when it’s not there. The latter seems to be especially concerning to those who are relatively new in their leadership positions.
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read more Adam DrakeOverview I was meeting with a client recently, and since it was the end of the year and they were in their budgeting process we were discussing forecasting methodologies. They were asking about their marketing function specifically, but the conversation applied more or less to all areas of the business which set targets and/or develop a budget. So basically, the whole business.
It’s important to note that in many companies budgeting and forecasting are the same thing, so this is as much a budgeting topic as a forecasting one.
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read more Adam DrakeGood leadership is hard to quantify, especially when considering intrinsic qualities like humility (which I argue is the most important quality of all). However, there are external skills which can separate effective and ineffective leaders, and communication is arguably the most fundamental of those externally-visible skills.
When a company is small, and everyone fits in a single room, then a shared vision can almost be maintained by osmosis. Additionally, at this stage a company is usually extremely focused on a narrow goal or set of goals, so there is clarity not only due to small company sizes having more efficient communication, but also because the set of objectives is small as well.
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read more Adam DrakeFirst, the problem definition:
Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be:
1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, …
By considering the terms in the Fibonacci sequence whose values do not exceed four million, find the sum of the even-valued terms.
Classic Fibonacci problem, with a slight twist due to the summation on top.
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read more Adam DrakeIntroduction As part of my work in keeping my technical skills sharp, I periodically go back to basics or solve old problems again in order to ensure my foundations are strong. So it was with great fun that I decided to start back at the beginning with Project Euler.
One of the techniques I also use for this sort of thing is not just to solve the problem, but to really explore it.
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