In a recent blog, we posed the question, “Do we live to work or work to live?” and used that as a springboard to talk about Millennials. There doesn’t seem to be any agreement on specific beginning and ending dates for this generation, but it’s generally thought to be people born in the early to
“The best ideas for improving a job come from those who do it every day.”
A lot has been written lately about “employee engagement” . . . some of it right here. The Gallup organization, which has studied it for many years, says employee engagement can be measured by the strength of the emotional connection an employee feels toward his or her company. If the employee sings the company song,
Do we live to work or work to live?
Americans work hard . . . at least they work longer hours than their counterparts in the world’s largest economies. On average, an adult fulltime worker in this country works 47 hours a week. If you filter out hourly workers and consider only salaried workers, that number rises to 49 hours. Four in ten of
“Time spent on hiring is time well spent.”
Even though the Great Recession is far back in our rearview mirror, the recovery has been painfully slow, particularly for small businesses. Small business owners have not gone on a hiring spree, in part, because they have learned how to get along without some of the positions they eliminated during the recession. Also, because the
“Be the last to speak.”
Simon Sinek is one of our favorite speakers on business topics. In our last posting, we talked about one of his “10 Rules for Success” . . . namely, the importance of continuous improvement. He challenges us to ask, every day, “How can we make our company a better company today than it was yesterday?”
“I do not believe you can do today’s job with yesterday’s methods and be in business tomorrow.”
For most of us, when we think about innovation, we think about companies like Apple, Microsoft, or Google. We think about breakthrough, disruptive technologies like the GraphicalUser Interface which took access to the Worldwide Web from the hands of a few geeks who could write computer code and gave it to the masses. In other
“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people. “
If you’re not a hockey fan, the name John McDonough probably doesn’t mean much to you. But if you’re a Chicago Blackhawks fan, you probably have a shrine to him somewhere in your home. He joined the Blackhawks in 2007 as President, and under his stewardship, the team’s season ticketholder base has grown from 3,400
“The art of delegation is one of the key skills any entrepreneur must master.”
The stereotypical entrepreneur is a guy running around with his or her hair on fire, pushing all the buttons, pulling all the levers, and wearing all the hats. We’re all wired a little bit differently, but ultimately, we all reach the limit of what we can do alone, and when we do reach that point,
“Has anyone ever said, ‘I wish I could go to more meetings today’?”
Everybody complains about meetings . . . they’re too long, boring, and don’t accomplish anything. Or as humorist Dave Barry puts it, “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’ “ Unfortunately, too many
What kind of clubhouse are you running?
The stunning, come-from-behind victory of the Chicago Cubs in the 2016 World Series made me wonder if there might be some business lessons to be learned there. Sure, it’s a sports franchise, but major league baseball teams are businesses too. Yet we tend to experience them as entertainment, not as business models to be studied.