One Reason U.S. Productivity Growth Has Slowed, and What to Do About It

Economists have struggled over the last decade to attribute and explain the dramatic slowing of U.S. productivity growth. Since 2005, U.S. labor productivity growth (growth of measured output minus the growth of labor input) has been effectively sawed in half. As one of the few real indicators of economic vitality, understanding this phenomena is anything […]

Stupid Manager Tricks

For better than two decades, late night talk show host, David Letterman ran hilarious periodic segments, Stupid Pet Tricks, highlighting silly tricks that people had taught their pets to perform. In a somewhat similar fashion, most of us manager-types have, over the years and the course of our careers adopted or fallen into habits and thought […]

Three Things that will Improve Employee Engagement

Recently I read a piece in the e-version of a major business publication which, by title and implication suggested that seventy percent of Americans hate their work. The piece used as its factual anchor the oft-quoted “State of the American Workplace Report” by Gallup, which suggests that only about 30% of American workers are truly “engaged” in […]

Have You Ever Been Attacked by a Shark?

Guest post by Jonathan Cardwell Mick Fanning has been.  Last month while surfing a competition off the Eastern Cape of South Africa, Mick was attacked by a shark.  He bravely fought off the shark and escaped without any physical injuries. You may never come face to face with an actual shark.  You may never even […]

Should We Stop Doing Performance Reviews?

For the past few years there has been a hue and a cry, joined of late by large numbers of HR professionals, suggesting that companies need to stop doing traditional performance appraisals. You know what we’re talking about – those semi-annual (usually), awkward, occasionally unpleasant, and never timely conversations where you and your boss are […]

Work-Life Balance… Learning to Like and Live With Chocolate Milk

In a presentation last week for a group of healthcare industry managers, I was asked to comment on “work-life balance.” My remarks were prefaced with the admission that I’m fairly certain I no longer know what “work-life balance” means. At one time, the term implied that there is a point of demarcation where one’s work […]

Reputation Recruits, but Reality Retains

In the last few weeks, US universities have disgorged nearly 2 million new graduates into the job market, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. American companies have been working hard (and spending a fortune) to recruit these new graduates, as well as others. They may want to also consider putting more effort into […]

Choose a Great Boss. Be a Great Boss

Guest post by Ivan Serrano The best technique for getting ahead at work is choosing a great boss. Not a great job, a great boss. A great boss is one who listens to employees, who is willing to let employees make mistakes and learn from them, who understands the value of loyalty, who is willing […]

Listening… Really Listening

Recently, I came uncomfortably close to dying in a well-equipped, modern, metropolitan hospital emergency room, a building that I had walked into under my own power. The cause of the near death experience was preventable. It had nothing to do with staffing shortages, Obamacare, or a packed emergency department. Rather, it had a lot to […]

Leaders… You Really Need Truth-Tellers

My last real (corporate) job was an eleven-year run with a very fast moving “550 mph warehouse” as the company’s founder and CEO has been known to put it. Shortly after I accepted the job offer but before the start date, my new boss, a blunt talking former FBI agent summoned me for a little extra […]