Three Life Lessons from a Rowboat

The year was 1993. I had been working for the same company for over a decade. I had changed job roles at least six times, doing (sometimes completely) different things, but now something was missing. I was no longer excited about coming to work. A group of us had fallen in the habit of eating [...]

By |2018-12-13T06:00:50-06:00December 13th, 2018|Articles|

Three Life Lessons on Balance from Riding a Bicycle

Do you remember how you learned to ride a bicycle? Were you one of the lucky ones that learned easily? Or is the memory so terrifying that you’ve blocked it out of your consciousness (like me)? Regardless, the process involves several stages of learning, some of them at the same time. (Or if you were [...]

By |2018-11-29T06:00:43-06:00November 29th, 2018|Articles|

Would You Like to Impact the World?

It seems to be a basic human desire to have an impact on the world. Just Google “quote make a difference” and browse some of the results. If you are like me, you will be inspired to read quotes from Emerson, Ghandi, Robert Kennedy, Thoreau, and a host of others. Even Steve Jobs of Apple [...]

By |2018-11-22T06:00:40-06:00November 22nd, 2018|Articles|

Three Levels of Employee Recognition

The business benefits of employee recognition are numerous. Studies published by Forbes and Hppy show that employee recognition improves engagement, customer satisfaction, employee retention, employee experience, and performance. Actually, “Praise and commendation from managers was rated the top motivator for performance, beating out other noncash and financial incentives, by 67% of workers,” according to GetHppy.com. [...]

By |2018-11-01T06:05:13-05:00November 1st, 2018|Articles|

Coaching is not a Punishment

It was my wife in our early days of marriage who set the record straight—I was wrong about gas stations. Up until that time, I thought the big numbers posted on gas pumps were the year the oil was collected. And so “93” meant it was from the year 1993. This made sense because the [...]

By |2018-10-25T06:00:32-05:00October 25th, 2018|Articles|

Be More Productive By Doing Less

We live in a culture that tells us that we can do more and have it all, but the studies don’t bear this out. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that employee productivity has only grown .3% over the past 3 years, yet we are working longer hours and the average work week is [...]

By |2018-10-18T06:00:51-05:00October 18th, 2018|Articles|

Life is Fragile

I haven’t written for a few weeks because for a couple of them, I was sick. It all started with some symptoms that looked like Lyme disease. I’m from Pennsylvania, which is one of those tick-rich states where Lyme is a threat. I went to the doctor’s office and he thought it looked like Lyme, [...]

By |2018-10-11T06:00:38-05:00October 11th, 2018|Articles|

Creating Family Core Values

This past May I attended the Ramsey Solutions EntreLeadership Summit. There were many takeaways from the conference, but one that really stuck with me is a talk Dave Ramsey gave when he spoke about how his company created core values. He created them to give his employees a rubric of how to work and act [...]

By |2018-10-04T06:00:48-05:00October 4th, 2018|Articles|

7 Drivers of a Contagious Strengths Movement

Last time I suggested that a sweeping strengths movement larger than we've ever seen could be coming. I defined strengths as, “your best means of contribution and contentment,” and wrote that few us have really tapped into the talents, traits, skills, knowledge, values, and more that are within us. And I commended us to seek humility as [...]

By |2018-09-27T06:00:57-05:00September 27th, 2018|Articles|