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Joan Bragar is the Founder and Principal of BostonLeadership Inc., a Boston-based workplace consulting and leadership coaching practice. Prior to establishing her own firm, she was Director of Research at Forum Corporation, a leadership development organization. During her tenure at Forum, Bragar led a major research project to identify practices that distinguishes high-performing leaders. Here, she spotlights the project’s findings and implications.

R. James Macaleer spent 30 years building Shared Medical Systems, Inc. (SMS), located in Malvern, Pennsylvania. SMS provides data processing and software to hospitals and physician groups in the USA and around the world in over 20 countries. Drawing on his experiences in building SMS, Macaleer is a popular speaker on entrepreneurship to business groups. In this commentary he shares his thoughts on what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

According to the US Small Business Administration, eight out of ten businesses fail within three years. Research further reveals that 43 per cent of business plans in the companies that fail are used as a vehicle to secure business loans, but not for actually running the company. As a result, opportunities for greater revenue, lower costs and increased profits are being lost unnecessarily. Business owners have crossed over the Abasia Point©.

Family firms represent the predominant form of business across the globe. In the USA, at most conservative estimates, family-run businesses contribute nearly 30 per cent – or $2.6 trillion – of the gross domestic product (GDP), with 27 per cent of the national workforce employed by a family firm. In the domain of publicly-traded firms, family businesses constitute over 35 per cent of the S&P 500 index.

Do companies need consultants? According to Carl Thor, there is no universal answer. To determine when a consultant may be appropriate, it is important to look at the wide variety of roles a consultant can play. Thor is President of Jarrett-Thor International, an Alexandria, Virginia consulting firm specializing in the metrics of productivity and quality improvement. The author of Measure of Success, which deals with performance metrics, he is the former President of the American Productivity and Quality Center in Houston, Texas.