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Three Keys to Managing People and Risk That I Learned From Teaching Au Pairs to Drive
There is no perfect solution to childcare. There are all kinds of childcare options with various trade-offs in convenience, stress, and guilt. Anyone who has peeled a clinging child off of their legs at the door of the daycare center while other parents looked on with a mix of empathy and fear knows what I mean.…
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Three Keys to the Successful Launch of a New Employee that I Learned Baling Hay
Mr. Lemmel was my first manager. I was a suburban kid working as a farm hand for the summer. On my first day, he needed me to help bale hay. He drove a tractor over to his gas pump to fill up the tank for the day. Then he told me to sit in the…
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Five Reasons Your Company Is Addicted to Reorganization and How to Survive the Next One
Some companies seem to be in a constant state of reorganization. It’s almost an addiction. If you want to survive reorganizations, you need to be a bridge not a box. More on this in a minute, but first, it helps to understand why companies reorganize so often? 1. Modern enterprises tend to describe themselves in…
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Confronting the Near Enemy: Is One Emotion Masquerading as Another?
One of the reasons I like reading fiction is that every now and then, an author will sneak a wonderful bit of wisdom into a story that grabs me in a way that is much more memorable than if I had read it in a textbook or journal article. Usually when I discover such a passage,…
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Is Your Market Going to be Uberfied or AirBnB’d? Disruptive Innovations Coming Your Way
Uber is a “private car for hire” service which uses a mobile app to handle the whole engagement and payment transaction including rating both drivers and riders. It has the taxi industry trying to set up roadblocks. AirBnB matches up people who want to rent out their apartments (trailers, rooms, etc.) with people looking for…