"Leadership" Posts
A Good Working Environment
By Ken DiPrima
All too often, companies hire large masses of people in order to fill high turnover slots on their personnel rosters with little regard to the employees that they hired or for the ultimate success of the company. Hiring and training costs eat into precious profits and, frequently, fail to deliver the desired outcome.
What steps can a company take to make certain that these two vital functions more successful and long lasting?
If you think that change is hard for clients to accept and implement, just think how difficult it is for new employees to become acclimated and productive in …
“Say It Ain’t So, Joe.”
By Ken DiPrima
“Say it ain’t so, Joe.” So goes the legendary question asked of ‘Shoeless Joe’ Jackson after he was accused of being part of the ring of Chicago White Sox players who ‘threw’ the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Before being banned for life from baseball for his actions, Jackson was, at the time, among the game’s super stars with a lifetime batting average of .356 in a short 13 year span. He hit an incredible .408 in 1911, his first full major league season. No one wanted to believe that he could have been involved.
And, then, there …
A Rant and Some Resolution For Business Owners
By 
Sometimes, when we have time to digest the 24/7 information explosion that has unfortunately become the norm, you have to say to yourself, “what are we doing!” The proverbial ‘WE,’ meaning ‘WE’ as a society appear to be so lost, out of control, disoriented, discombobulated, immune, unaffected and cynical, that even the most horrific of circumstances that we encounter fail to make an emotional dent in our daily lives.
We seem to have come to the conclusion, if we are not immediately impacted, that there is no consequence. Natural disasters, sad, but unless we are the victim, oh well… Genocide, …
How A New Perspective Revolutionized Automotive Manufacturing
By Tom Ryan
Most people learn from their history books that Henry Ford revolutionized the manufacture of automobiles by introducing a moving assembly line in order to increase production and lower costs. This is true. What the history books don’t reveal is that this idea was NOT Henry Ford’s!
Here’s the real story behind how Henry Ford utilized a new viewpoint to ‘assemble’ cars, which ultimately changed history:
The idea actually came from William ‘Pa’ Klann, one of Ford’s engineers, who had visited the Swift & Company’s slaughterhouse in Chicago. There, Klann had viewed what he called a ‘disassembly line’ for dressing beef. …
Beat the Meeting Blues: 10 Tips to Improve Meetings
By Zach Miller
For too many employees, the weekly Monday meeting is the longest two hours of the day. They may drag their feet to the conference room, yawn during the presentation, check their missed texts throughout the meeting, and contribute minimally to the conversation in order to leave an uncomfortable position as early as possible.
The team meeting is not just a mandatory event—it has utility that should directly benefit the participants and the company. When a meeting is regarded as a nuisance, however, the functionality is lost and the benefits disappear. To best take advantage of the meeting, here are ten …
Creating Buy-In For Change
By 
Change can be a fear generating activity and developing buy-in may seem impossible. The more established a business, the greater the resistance to change. New ideas will bounce off a wall of “this is the way that it has always been done.”
Often there is a vested interest in maintaining the status quo by management and employees, alike.
Perhaps there were past attempts at change, which failed, so that future change is deemed hopeless. A cynical attitude can develop among employees that change is only being given lip-service (think of numerous companies that claim customer service is number one, yet …
Survivor Style
By GPSBy Dan Light as featured in Construction Today
In tumultuous times, leadership skills could be the guiding light to steer your business out of the storm.
Just as basically healthy individuals recover more quickly from illness, so, too, do healthy businesses recover from a few bumps in the road, such as an economic downturn. Among the retrospective measures that reflect the company’s health are items on the balance sheet and income statement, including cash flow, net profit, growth rate, productivity and return on investment rates. Unfortunately, by the time such historical data indicate symptoms of trouble, it may already be …
