When Google launched in the late nineties, it was a simple search engine designed to make the internet easier to navigate. In 2016, Google is unapologetically an ad platform, with the Adwords pay-per-click (PPC) service generating a whopping 97% of its $73 billion sales in 2015.

For many businesses, PPC is an addiction; their sole means of generating web referrals, because they’ve turned off all other marketing activities.

It’s a risky game to play. While PPC is certainly making Google a lot of money, it doesn’t work well for all businesses. Cost-per-click may be as low as £0.04 in some areas, but the highest ranking keywords – those which attract the highest number of searches and clicks – can command fees in excess of £35. So, while PPC definitely can work for some, it can be an ineffective, expensive drain on resources for others.

Which leads to the question, when should a business adopt PPC, and when should they leave it well alone?

Business leaders are challenged to create an environment in which staff are willing to volunteer their discretionary effort to go the extra mile. 

The best designed systems and processes only deliver peak efficiency if the people using them are functioning at their optimal capacity. We all know that you can’t manage what you can’t measure – yet few organisations are aware of the empirically validated key indicators that govern human engagement – let alone how to measure them.

As a leader, are you regularly challenging, engaging, exciting and inspiring the people around you? Perhaps it’s time to take a step back and refresh your thinking so you can grow into the future.

Marcus Child has had a powerful impact on the people and the performance of many well-known businesses over the past 18 years. He inspires confidence, wholeheartedness and courage, and has built up an impressive reputation for helping thousands of employees of hundreds of organisations embrace change positively and successfully. One of Vistage's most popular and highly rated speakers, Marcus will push you to dream big and achieve more.

Discover strategies that will empower your people and have a positive impact on your bottom line. 

Your people are the most essential part of your business. It’s time to motivate your people and take actions to produce measurable results - all of which will feed into customer satisfaction. Transforming the talent within your organisation will help you to transform your profitability - and we’ve highlighted exactly what you should be prioritising.

Why be 10% better, when you could be 10 times better?

Gamechangers are disruptive and innovative start-ups and corporates, in every sector and region, reshaping our world, according to Peter Fisk, author of Gamechangers.

Gamechangers think and act differently. They win by being smart, fast and connected – rather than through scale and efficiency. They look beyond the sale to enable customers to achieve more. They care about their impact on people and the world. Ultimately they want to create a better world.

In this 20 minute video from our Vistage Open Day leadership and strategy expert Jim Alampi shares his original take on Patrick Lencioni's "5 Dysfunctions of a Team". He combines the most powerful moments from Lencioni's work with his own tools to bring new insights into how CEOs can enable and cultivate high performing teams within their companies.

Almost 8 out of 10 people regularly experience physical symptoms caused by stress. The cost of this for employers is around US$300bn every year in stress related health care and absences.

Stress-related presenteeism (defined as the lost productivity that occurs when employees come to work but, as a consequence of illness or other conditions, are not fully functioning) and absentism are costing employers more than AU$10billion a year.

As industry leaders, it makes sense for boards to tackle this costly issue. And the first step in doing so is to challenge how organisations, and society, have normalised and accepted stress. We actually expect we should feel stressed during certain circumstances e.g. tough market conditions, organisational change, busy times of year etc. For some professions it is almost worn as a merit badge of their commitment to success.

I recently saw an article by Fiona Smith on '6 ways to boost your word-of-mouth'. The title in itself grabbed me – why? Because when we ask business leaders the key question ‘How do your customers find you?’ and they don’t know the answer, they always say ‘word-of-mouth’.

I know they are trying to dodge the question, or if they are not dodging the question they typically don’t have the data to back up the answers to the next two questions:
• Who are your best referrers?
• How much business did they introduce to you last year?

Pixar is an amazing business. Built on imagination and creativity, it harnesses the potential of digital technologies to create the most engaging characters and films.

In 1979 Star Wars creator George Lucas and computer scientist Ed Catmull established the foundations of what was initially a digitally-enabled special effects business. Seven years later Steve Jobs acquired the studio, renamed it Pixar, and gave birth to some of the most successful animated films - like Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Today it is the creative heartbeat of the Disney empire, and one of the world’s most innovative businesses.

Pixar is a digital content business, and in many ways that’s what brands are today. Beyond the products and services which they support, brands are about ideas, stories, relationships and communities, and the capturing and sharing of them increasingly digitally, virtual experiences which become reality.