The Value Quotient

Take a deep breath. An advantage of being an elder presence in the workforce (and I assure you there are many) is that I carry with me a long canon of previous experience and can get past many things if not all with some set of ease if not a sense of déjà vu. Haven't …

Its Nice to Be Back

Hi there. Its nice to be back. Yours truly took a month off, accidentally as it were, as a number of forces collided to sidetrack me. There is the wonderful position that opened almost magically after I turned down three other roles in the past few months. The rain that wouldn't stop that hurt many …

Fired Up

Have you ever fired anyone? I have. I hope you never have to do this. Thirty years ago I lost sleep the night before I had to tell someone they weren't coming back. I still do - I hope I never lose that sense of empathy. When I first began my career at Procter & …

Engagement Wins

Let's talk about engagement. No, not the connection of employee to work that so many speak of, let's take it down a level, or up, depending on how you look at that. Let's talk people to people. I just left my favorite grocery store - Central Market on N. Lamar in Austin - where engagement …

Kindness

Kill them with kindness. The other day a client engaged me in a thoroughly pissed-off manner. I'm not sure what had happened in the earlier part of his day but when he reached me he was already in a foul mood. In other words, he was like that when I found him. He called looking …

Tale of Two Pities

Can we talk? Not long ago I worked with a client (I always protect anonymity) and as part of my charter was to look at productivity. Now consultants will tell you productivity is an after the fact measure. It's an output of a simple equation: Skills + Resources x Direction = Output. Fundamentally it's rare …

Expecting

Do you know what you're doing? Not long ago I mentioned that research done by Ferndinand Fournies years ago revealed that the number one reason employees don't do what we want them to do - what they're supposed to do as Fournies said - was that they didn't know what that was. Let that sink …

Open Office Blues

Shh! Be quiet! I'm trying to work! The greatest corporate lie of the last 20 years (and geez, there have been more than a few candidates for that honor) is that the open office concept works. What nonsense. Article after article has suggested that somehow this openness translates into faster communication and synergistic creativity as …

The Bell Ringer

Ring your bell.There's an old grocery store here - well, 40 years, old by US standards - that I don't use much. You see I can walk to two others and they're both organic so I don't need the first often. But it is near and big and every now and then I stop in. …

Commitment

Are you committed?The many grey hairs I now possess (I suppose I should be thankful for having "many") lead others to think I might have a bit of work a day wisdom to impart and that's true. While my own mistakes are sometimes the source of said learning, I've also understood quite a bit about …