Is middle management dead? As industry after industry has felt the effects of consolidation and disintermediation, the ranks of middle managers have, in many cases, dwindled.

The benefit of escaping the assumption that your customers know all of the things you offer can mean increasing your revenue by 10 to 20 percent — or more.

It is important to identify the larger external trends that will most affect your organization in the coming years. But trees still don’t grow to the sky, and executives can find themselves off track without an understanding of whether trends will stall or even reverse.

Your customers and prospects might have a big problem and not even know it. How well equipped is your business to help them find that big problem and ultimately help solve it?

If your prospective buyers are consistently putting off decisions that to you seem like slam-dunks, then it is time to take stock of what is happening in your buyers’ minds.

Business people need to understand data and use it to communicate effectively with consumers, regulators and the media. How can you make your case, clearly and honestly, in such a skeptical age?

The story behind the Statue of Liberty’s trip to America involves marketing, competition, envy, and the media, including lessons for fundraising today.

How can you make sure your great new story is not only worth sharing but actually does get shared?

Across different organizations and industries, I tend to hear a number of words and phrases repeated over and over — e.g., “authentic,” “passion,” “disruptive,” “game-changer.” That isn’t necessarily bad, yet it does carry the risk of your team’s conversations sounding like nearly everyone else’s.

One of the most powerful forces of persuasion is “social proof,” the tendency of people to look to the behavior of similar others when they aren’t sure what is correct in a given situation. You can find evidence of social proof nearly everywhere.

An increasing number of organizations have dramatically changed their approach to training, making it far less about dispensing information and far more about engagement and skill development.

We are all hearing more about the power of storytelling when it comes to marketing our products, services, ideas and even ourselves. Now, research at the neurochemical level is revealing how stories affect activity in our brains.

Here are three practices that should help graduate business students — and anyone who wants to get off to a fast start in his career — to stand out among the waves of millennial professionals.

A recent report from ESPN uncovered a real doozy. It is the amazing story of how the most powerful sports apparel company in the world, Nike, let the most electric player in the NBA, Stephen Curry, out of its grasp — and allowed Under Armour to pull off one of the most valuable marketing switcheroos in history.

There’s a bigger picture when it comes to pictures: New research shows that the mere act of writing things out, and drawing pictures of information you need to remember, will improve your memory. That should help you be more persuasive and effective.

The decisions involved in buying or selling the places where we live or work can be tightly wrapped in aspirations, hopes and anxiety.

Customer conversations — those interactions in real time, generally face to face — are ripe for improving engagement, service levels, loyalty and growth.

Although change initiatives are common and well-intentioned (and often necessary), the results are usually a letdown.

We human beings can be a strange lot when in our role as consumers. We tend to behave differently as buyers when other human beings are involved in the process of selling to us.

The marketing/creative divide can appear whether the creatives are part of an in-house team, are hired guns in an agency or a hybrid. It can arise from a number of factors, including differences in educational paths, language, culture, motivation and compensation.