The Executive Brief

Retained executive search often seems to scare business owners - or perhaps it just confuses them. They wonder: if other recruiters only charge me if/when I hire one of their candidates, why would I ever pay a recruiting firm a retainer fee?

This is a great question. Let me answer it by making an ...

At some point in its history, the executive search industry made a (perhaps not so) brilliant decision to categorize firms by their fee structures; Retained vs. Contingent.

 For CEOs and other executive leaders running a small or mid-sized business, it may be easy to skip right on by this article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune last week. It focused on the talent shortage in largest 50 companies in the Minneapolis market.

As a Visionary, your eyes are always on the big picture, audacious goals, new ideas and growth, growth, growth. For the most part, this is a great thing; it’s why you’ve gotten this far in your business. But even the fastest sports cars in the world are made with brakes. At times you need to slow ...

At KeyStone, we have a particular appreciation for ESOP companies. They have an innate understanding of the importance of cultural fit and alignment to things we have built our practice upon. I am very excited to be attending and speaking at the 2017 NCEO annual conference in Denver, Colorado next ...

It's actually a bit of a trick question.

Any company that wants to grow needs an Integrator.

But companies with leadership teams who are adamantly against hiring an Integrator, are probably the ones who need them the most. 

In my 20+ years of serving private companies, I’ve observed many leaders ...

At some point in my childhood, I decided it was time for a 10 speed bike. My parents thought I should buy this bike with my own money, to teach me the value of a dollar.

The Volkswagen environmental cheating scandal that broke in September of 2015 threw Corporate Culture into the spotlight - and not in a positive way. Some wrote that Volkswagen's "culture of arrogance" was to blame, while others simply blame a lack of morals at the top of the company. Similar to ...

According to a study published a month ago in Science Advances, the earth is in the midst of a mass extinction, one that rivals the extinction of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. The study reveals that since 1900, 69 mammal species and another 400 vertebrate species have gone missing. It ...

Gino Wickman, creator of the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS) and author of Traction, has released a new book called Rocket Fuel: The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business.  Along with co-author Mark Winters and a host of other collaborators ...