You may have heard the story about the US shoe company and its quest to grow sales in India. If so, please bear with me to remind some of our new readers. If you would prefer to listen to a podcast version of this article CLICK HERE In the early 1900s, the CEO of a US based shoe company wanted to …
continuous improvement
#296: Defending Culture
For quite some time, I was part of the management team of a manufacturing facility in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Quality was top of mind as we were getting ready to hire a new plant manager. Senior management in the organization refused to build high-profile components in Mexico because the expectation …
Hit me with your best shot
The famous Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had an Intern working for him. On one random Thursday morning, Secretary Kissinger asks the Intern to write a position paper on a particular topic. If you would rather listen to a podcast version, CLICK HERE, otherwise continue reading The Intern is …
Does your team remind you of a 5 year olds soccer team?
Johnny! Run a LAP! Somehow I was voluntold to become a soccer coach when my daughter was 5-years old. Mind you, I knew nothing about soccer having never played before. After going to the library and reading up a bit (yes, the library - Google had not yet been invented), I figured out the basics of …
What can you learn by planning your summer vacations?
Planning your summer vacation? It's Memorial Day Weekend and the unofficial start of summer. What are your plans? Have you decided where you are going to spend those days or weeks off? Maybe you've elected to take every Friday off between now and Labor Day so you can get long weekends in and do a …
Do you know what you want?
I was approached by a coaching client getting ready for a job interview. Their main concern was to come up with a narrative of what they could do in a position that had become vacant within their current employers' organization. My questions to the client: What do they need? How will they measure …
What’s the oxygen level in your organization?
I want to first apologize for missing Friday's Blog. For all the money you are paying me I should be at least consistent, right? If you saw last Tuesday's blog, I mentioned that I had pneumonia, which actually became double pneumonia and some type of multi-organism infection. If you are wondering, …
Determining the value of the team
If I were to ask you what the value of this is, what is your answer? Pretty simple - it's $100. A nice crisp brand new bill. You would be able to give me one-hundred $1 bills, five - 20's, or any other combination to come up with the magical $100. Now, look at this picture … What's it worth? This …
Defining success by asking 3 simple questions
Listen to the PODCAST VERSION or Read Below Day 1 - Zig Ziglar Headquarters, July 2015 I am sitting in Class 7 of the Ziglar Legacy Certification class. To quickly summarize what that is; after the passing of Zig Ziglar in 2012, the family wanted to honor his legacy. They did so by …
What is the definition of fair?
"Fair is when one side gets exactly what they want and the other side gets just enough to stop complaining." - John Dutton, Yellowstone Although this is a great life lesson, it should never be your intent when you are negotiating. What ever happened to Covey's 7 Habits? If Covey had written …