Are you as smart as a 5th grader? New York’s Conference Board, a century-old research firm, began studying employee satisfaction and engagement 25 years ago. Their work shows that worker happiness has fallen every year since–in good economic times and bad. Today, over half of American workers effectively hate their jobs. What has become clear...Read More

Measuring Your Desire Meter If I want to get an idea of a person’s desire to grow and develop I ask a simple question.  “Are you satisfied with your life right now?”  If the answer is, “I’m very satisfied, very content with where I am”, I come to the conclusion that there is very little...Read More

[Email Insanity and Other Neurotic Behaviors] The Boston Consulting Group (www.bcg.com)  gives some interesting trends.  By 2016 there will be 3 billion internet users globally—almost half the world’s population.  The internet economy will reach $4.2 Trillion in the G-20 economies.  As a national economy it would rank in the world’s top five, only behind the U.S.,...Read More

The Voice of Wisdom or The Monkey Mind? The most important voice you’ll listen to today is yourself. There are a lot of voices that clamor for our attention—like monkeys chattering as they swing through the trees. But the one voice that has the most positive upside or the most negative downside isn’t what others...Read More

That’s the common phrase you often hear from pundits. But is it? When we first see something or somebody, the way we perceive it or them often determines how we think of them. Yet it’s important to understand that perception is subjective. Another way to say this is that it’s personal. The truth? We perceive...Read More

What’s True And What’s Myth? Sometime ago a USA Today Snapshot (2008), revealed the satisfaction level executives had with their jobs. Job/Satisfaction Level Finance – 68% Human Resources – 65% Marketing – 63% General Management – 61% Sales – 54% The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index confirmed those earlier findings. They have polled literally millions of adults...Read More

“Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself”. (Miles Davis) When we think unplugged, we think of musicians. We use the term when they give up all their technological advantages—the lights, electric guitars, speakers, amplifiers, media background, etc., and go back to their acoustic or box guitar and...Read More

(What Are Your Strength Roles?) What do people who excel in a particular job or position do differently than those who don’t. I’m talking about having exceptional levels of performance like engagement, retention, productivity, less work related accidents, or any job related performance you want to observe. It seems to always vary from team to...Read More

Let’s start with what everyone agrees on. It’s good for employees to be motivated and not so good when they’re not. So the question then becomes, why isn’t it happening on a more consistent basis? In our work with Millennials (Gen Y), Indifference is one of their perceived orientations by the thousands of managers we...Read More

(Millennials: Play To Their Strengths) When I was in high school the creative kid was someone out on the fringe. We (and their instructors), would say, “Boy. Does that kid have their head in the clouds!” The intended meaning was that they were hopelessly disconnected from the real world. How things have changed! Today “living...Read More