Whatever happened to the attitude that “the customer is always right”? The airline industry has been taking its hits lately, thanks to several mishandled passenger interactions: pulling a doctor off an overbooked flight in Chicago, a dispute over a carried-on stroller in San Francisco, a couple booted off a flight in Maui when they put their baby in a seat purchased for his … [More]
More Dollars from Data
According to Buckminster Fuller’s “Knowledge Doubling Curve,” human knowledge doubled approximately every century. Today, it is estimated that human knowledge is doubling every 12 to 13 months. IBM is estimating that, with the build out of the “Internet of things,” knowledge will double every 12 hours. The explosion of information is clearly accelerating. Data is flooding … [More]
Truth May Be Muddled in Perception
Imagine you’ve got an employee who’s recently been doing a lousy job. You sit him down and give him some constructive feedback about his subpar work. But instead of accepting your feedback, he looks at you genuinely bewildered and says, “I think I’ve been doing a great job. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about!” If you’ve ever had that challenge, you’ve witnessed … [More]
Employee Retirement Plans Are for Small Businesses, Too
Small-business owners probably think they have enough headaches already, what with meeting payroll, dealing with government regulations and pleasing customers. After all, setting up a retirement plan for their employees is just extra red tape and possibly expense — headaches that they can do without — right? But creating such a plan is more doable than they may realize and … [More]
Historically Successful Leadership
As Gordon Leidner notes in his introduction to The Leadership Secrets of Hamilton and the Founding Fathers, “the Founding Fathers’ adoption of the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights was the most revolutionary demonstration of leadership in American political history. … It was not because of the political unanimity of the nearly … [More]
Corporate Tax Reform: It’s Not Big Business vs Small Business
Reforming the U.S. corporate tax system could provide a major boost to U.S. economic growth and competitiveness, but progress continues to stall due in large part to small-business advocates who claim that corporate-only reform is unfair and economically harmful. Our studies have found significant flaws in their arguments. Corporate tax reform is one of the most important … [More]
Motivating the Ethical Choice
When we give public presentations on Corruption, Ethics or Leadership, we often begin with some version of a moral hypothetical. The exercise turns out exactly the same no matter the group. A father takes his only child into the state school board building where she will be tested to determine if she qualifies for a very special gifted student program. Admittance is … [More]
Yes, Businesses Have a Melt Rate
How can we gauge our relevance going forward in today’s tumultuous, disruptive and global business environment? How can we quickly determine if changes to our strategy and the way we do things is necessary? Are there a few key questions we would be wise to ask with our teams throughout the fiscal year? Let’s consider the case of the trillion-dollar U.S. food industry. As … [More]
How a Breach of Trust Can Propel You Forward
It is a critical planning time of year. Your senior leadership team needs your analytical skills tuned in to improving not just capital growth but the systems underpinning that growth. What happens when the system in need of improvement is behavioral? In the September edition of In Business Magazine, Tyrone Benson, Ph.D., quality and reliability research and development … [More]
Dad-Time as Employee Benefit
While much has been written and studied about women striving to balance career and parenthood, a new survey shows this isn’t just an issue for women — dads are facing challenges, too. According to the new Dads@Work Survey, more than half of working dads (57 percent) feel they don’t spend enough time with their children during the week, and 87 percent want to be more involved … [More]
Workplace Discrimination Dialogue Needs a Full Table
As is evident from any look at recent headlines, there is undoubtedly an immense amount of work to be done to eradicate bias and discrimination in America. Since this country starts and stops on economics, change in the workplace is fundamental if a national paradigm shift is to be achieved. One report by the Center for American Progress cites the fiscal damage of workplace … [More]
Employee Disengagement Underlies Saga of Sabotage
The recent arrest of a Mossack Fonesca employee in Geneva has called into question the motivations behind insider threats. Over the past four months, MF, a Panama-based law firm, has experienced two major breaches in data security. The first of these, dubbed the “Panama Papers scandal,” has broken records as the largest leak in history. In April of this year, 2.6 terabytes … [More]
Yes, Responsible Companies Perform Better
Study after study shows that companies known for sticking to their values perform better on financial metrics. While this may be a surprise to some, it actually makes total sense that socially responsible investments do better. Several factors increase the likelihood that conscious companies perform well: Clean-hands companies don’t have to pay expensive lawsuit … [More]
Social Media – Changing the World
“Imagine a world in which every person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” That, Wikipedia co-creator Jimmy Wales told his audience at a BBVA Compass Bank event in Phoenix last month, was the genesis of a project that has become a worldwide resource accessed by 400 million visitors every month. But making it truly accessible everyone necessitates … [More]
Companies Can Create Equality for Women
Time and time again women hear how far they have come and how the glass ceiling has been shattered. But, while women have made excellent progress, there is much left to do to achieve equality. Maintaining the status quo hurts women today and into the future. Treating women employees with a lack of respect or value hurts the company in the long term. Corporations want employees … [More]
Sales: Embrace Being No. 2
In the 2008 Olympics, Michael Phelps won the Gold Medal in the Men’s 100-meter butterfly, beating out Milorad Čavić by a mere .01 second. Literally, in 1/30th of the time it takes to blink, Phelps’s dreams were realized and Čavić’s dreams were dashed. Over the course of a salesperson’s lifetime, it’s inevitable that you will face this same struggle. You will be told no, be … [More]
Waste Not
Waste Management’s tagline for the Waste Management Phoenix Open is “The Greenest Show on Grass,” and the details in the adjoining column give testament to its commitment to that goal. The company’s dedication to “green” also extends beyond its own operations, and it hosts a forum every year alongside the Open that “gives us a chance to investigate and think more deeply about … [More]
For-Profit Stands on ‘For People’
It was 2009. The global economy was in the beginning of its worst downturn in many, many years. Barry-Wehmiller, at that time, was a 124-year-old company that had started as a supplier of bottle-washers and pasteurizers to the brewing industry. In the late 1980s, financial challenges forced the company to reinvent itself by beginning a process of acquiring companies that … [More]
