β
Leadership begins and ends with relationships
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Richard Polak (Work Smart Now: How to Jump Start Productivity, Empower Employees, and Achieve More)
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You canβt have trust without fairness
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Hanna Hasl-Kelchner (Seeking Fairness at Work: Cracking the New Code of Greater Employee Engagement, Retention & Satisfaction)
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Resources are hired to give results, not reasons.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
β
Fairness isnβt about charity. Itβs smart business.
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Hanna Hasl-Kelchner (Seeking Fairness at Work: Cracking the New Code of Greater Employee Engagement, Retention & Satisfaction)
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you must get the right talent and set the proper expectations. If you donβt, you will pay for the job twiceβthrough your employeesβ time and your own.
β
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Curtis L. Jenkins (Vision to Reality: Stop Working, Start Living)
β
Simply giving employees a sense of agency- a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority - can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.
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Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business)
β
Real leadership is treating your least favorite employee the same as your favorite
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Hanna Hasl-Kelchner (Seeking Fairness at Work: Cracking the New Code of Greater Employee Engagement, Retention & Satisfaction)
β
You cannot fix people who will not take feedback, because from their perspective, they do not have a problem.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
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The fool tries to adjust the truth so he does not have to adjust to it.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
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Be a worthy worker and work will come.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
β
If you want to keep your customers happy, start by keeping your employees happy.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Communication is how entrepreneurs tell their story, which, in turn, should inspire employees to work smart and encourage customers to action.
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Curtis L. Jenkins (Vision to Reality: Stop Working, Start Living)
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Your employees play an important role in writing the chapter on the success of your product.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Your business and your life will change when you really, really get it that some people are not going to change, no matter what you do, and that still others have a vested interest in being destructive.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
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Building a team is a huge task. This task canβt be delegated to someone else. Youβre the leader of your business and you have to behave like a leader for your employees.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
When there is transparency, your employees are aware of how their work is contributing to the project which makes them become more committed to the project.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
Trust plays an important role in making you a great leader because if your employees donβt trust you, they wonβt trust your vision or the action plan that you will share with them.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
Clearly defined job roles will eliminate any kind of dilemma. It will help an employee better understand what they are supposed to achieve as a part of their job description.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
A good management style will make the productivity of your employees go up which means your revenues and profits go up as well.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
A good vision will not just give your employees much-needed direction but also much-valued inspiration to do their work efficiently.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
Employees of a company need to be bound together with love and respect, and not by dissatisfaction and helplessness.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Employee loyalty is cheaper than hiring new employees, training them, and motivating them.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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If your employees are happy, they become your salespeople who speak with utmost passion for the company they work for.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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A discontent employee means not getting the results 100% and the loss of a company advocate as well.
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β
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
Building an employee team or employee tribe is a little time consuming which requires little effort but in the long process of achieving business growth, itβs totally worth it.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
Hiring is not as simple as you think. You have to make sure you are hiring somebody who is going to be a great fit in the kind of employee tribe youβre building.
β
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
Employees learn about the importance of consistency and quality control through their training program.
β
β
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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When you invest in your employeesβ development, theyβll spend their skills in your companyβs development.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
A team is built when your employees are inspired by the same vision and connected with the same goal.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
Loyalty development is tied to motivation, if you know what motivates an employee, you will be able to turn that into loyalty development.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Effective two-way communication is responsible for building the trust in a company and keeping the employees happy.
β
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
Transparency when things are going well and even when things are going bad, keeps all your employees in the chain which makes them feel connected to the project even more.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
Those days of autocratic leadership style are gone. Itβs the age of partnerships where all your employees are your partners.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
your employees need more than just paychecks.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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When employees are able to feel what you feel and see what you see in your idea, you wonβt need anything else to motivate them, and success will become inevitable.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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If you are hard to work with, you wonβt be able to build good and profitable business relationships. You might lose many good business partners, vendors, and even employees because they will find it tough to work with you.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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When a business streamlines its processes, it inevitably experiences other benefits which may include greater employee satisfaction, more profits, better accounting, and more.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
β
The first and the only rule of team building is employees being comfortable with each other.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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Your employees shouldnβt be scared of being let go but you should be scared of them leaving you.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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A good work culture and work environment is very crucial in helping your employees to put their best foot forward.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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One thing we should never forget is that the work of all the employees in a company depends on each other. What one does will affect another.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
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A vision needs to show the future goals of your company and these goals need to be beneficial for all including your employees, customers, stakeholders, and most importantly, the environment.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
In this global economy of rapid change, innovation is not a nice-to-have anymore - it's a necessity. Every employee in the business needs to be innovation capable or innovation adaptive.
β
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
β
You need an environment where your employees are not afraid to share even their silliest ideas. A place where they are respected, loved and heard, where they feel like an important part of the team.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
Getting to the next level always requires ending something, leaving it behind, and moving on. Growth itself demands that we move on. Without the ability to end things, people stay stuck, never becoming who they are meant to be, never accomplishing all that their talents and abilities should afford them.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
Your task should be to share the goals and some important instructions related to your brand image, rest how that project needs to be executed so that the goals are met is going to be your employeesβ task now.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
Training looks like a financial loss to many but when your employees learn something new and implement the same for your company, they improve efficiency of your business process which gives you a competitive edge.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
Sometimes the right business decision is to let it go - to let go of an underperforming employee, to let go of an unprofitable branch, to let go of a weak advertising campaign, and to let go of an idea that fails to create the hype you wanted it to be.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
You have to start treating your employees as equals and start sharing things with honesty. By doing so, it will make them feel a part of the project, but it will also make them think of new and improved ways of doing the same things.
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Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
β
Failing well means ending something that is not working and choosing to do something else better.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
Without the ability to end things, people stay stuck, never becoming who they are meant to be, never accomplishing all that their talents and abilities should afford them.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
A business is an ensemble of people. The energies, attitudes and personalities of employees come together and form the energy, attitude and personality of the business.
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β
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
β
73. ...There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow our employerβs orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone elseβs employee.
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β
Theodore John Kaczynski (Industrial Society and Its Future)
β
It's just as great to be an employee as it is to be an entrepreneur. Great employees add immense value to businesses and therefore to markets and to economies. Being an employee is important.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
β
When truth presents itself, the wise person sees the light, takes it in, and makes adjustments.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
A major determinant of a businesses success is the productivity of its employees.
β
β
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
β
The best way to help your consumers with your business is to treat your employees right so they give better customer service, empower them so they can provide faster solutions, and to treat your vendors and partners fairly and with respect so they can continually provide the best product and services to their ability. - Strong by Kailin Gow
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β
Kailin Gow
β
One of the most important types of decision making is deciding what you are not going to do, what you need to eliminate in order to make room for strategic investments.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
Wisdom comes from experience, either the experience of others or of oneself. And to let experience do its work, a person has to be open to receiving the lessons that it has to teach.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
Businesses are at all times and in different ways accountable to employees, suppliers, customers and community.
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β
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
β
there are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee: motivation and training.
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β
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
β
Page 142: "When a spouse says to the alcoholic, "you need to go to AA," that is obviously not true. The addict feels no need to do that at all, and isn't. But when she says, "I am moving out and will be open to getting back together when you are getting treatment for your addiction," then all of a sudden the addict feels "I need to get some help or I am going to lose my marriage." The need has been transferred. It is the same with any kind of problematic behavior of a person who is not taking feedback and ownership. The need and drive to do something about it must be transferred to that person, and that is done through having consequences that finally make him feel the pain instead of others. When he feels the pain, he will feel the need to change...A plan that has hope is one that limits your exposure to the foolish person's issues and forces him to feel the consequences of his performance so that he might have hope of waking up and changing.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
Loyalty is important, one of the most important character traits we can have. But loyal love does not mean infinite and/or misplaced responsibility for another's life, nor does it mean that one forever puts up with mistreatment out of inappropriate loyalty.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
Sometimes there is bleeding when you cut out a cancer.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
Most people don't need to be babied through business processes. Most often, what they need is a clear understanding of the objective and access to available resources. From there, they'll leverage their own creative capacity and skillets to ensure that the objective is accomplished.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Business Essentials)
β
When people say the word "convention," they are usually referring to large gatherings of the employees of companies and corporations who attend a mass assembly, usually in a big hotel somewhere, for the purpose of pretending to learn stuff when they are in fact enjoying a free trip somewhere, time off work, and the opportunity to flirt with strangers, drink, and otherwise indulge themselves. The first major difference between a business convention and a fan-dom convention is that fandom doesnβt bother with the pretenses. Theyβre just there to have a good time. The second difference is the dress codeβ the ensembles at a fan convention tend to be considerably more novel.
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Jim Butcher (Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files, #8))
β
If climate drives business results, what drives climate? 50-70% of how employees perceive their organizationβs climate corresponds to the actions of one person: their manager.
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Raymond Wheeler (Lift: Five Practices Great Managers Do Consistently: Raise Performance and Morale - See Your Employees Thrive)
β
When companies act ethically, they build trust with their employees, customers, investors, and communities.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Virtuous Boardroom: How Ethical Corporate Governance Can Cultivate Company Success)
β
...[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion.
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β
Dan Ariely (The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home)
β
The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The Struggle is when people ask you why you donβt quit and you donβt know the answer. The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right. The Struggle is when food loses its taste.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
β
Even as an entrepreneur, you need to see yourself as an employee of your business.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Business Essentials)
β
Engaged employees are more productive, innovative, and committed to the company's success. They become passionate advocates for your brand and contribute to a positive work environment that attracts and retains top talent.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
β
In order to have a healthy economy, we need both entrepreneurs and employees. We need business of every size and we need people to accept the many jobs offered by those businesses. So it's okay to celebrate entrepreneurship, but let's also celebrate the good things about being an employee.
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β
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
β
It's good to celebrate the value your business adds. Every employee in the business should celebrate the value the business adds. What you celebrate, you give life to.
At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're here to help your business figure this out, and to provide holistic solutions.
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β
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
β
Children imitate their parents, employees their managers.
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Amit Kalantri
β
Pruning is strategic. It is directional and forward-looking. It is intentional toward a vision, desires, and objectives that have been clearly defined and are measurable. If you have that, you know what a rose is, and pruning will help you get one of true beauty.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
Page 99: "...unless something changes, the future that you can expect is more of the past. Sorry or becoming committed does not make Jim Carrey a great golfer, or made Jack nicklaus funny. Recommitment does not make a person who is unsuited for a particular position suited for it all of a sudden. Promises by someone who has a history of letting you down in a relationship mean nothing certain in terms of the future.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
first, accept life cycles and seasons; second, accept that life produces too much life, and third, accept that incurable illness and sometimes evil are part of life too. Taken together, these three principles will help you to make peace with endings, so that when their time has come, you will be able to do what you need to do.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
Don't be that employee that complains all the time! Instead, be that employee that sees opportunities within the business and weeks to collaborate with colleagues and management to make the business better.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Business Essentials)
β
I think I screamed. She certainly did. I started to walk away, she followed. We continued to scream at each other. We were in the middle of a busy square. People stopped to look at us. A lot of people. I wonder now what they thought. That Jin-Ae was my wife? My lover? Surely not an ambitious employee haranguing her boss!
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β
Oliver Dowson
β
Leadership requires kindness. If the people in positions of power in the company are cruel and mean to the other employees, it puts the whole company into a fear vibration. And that repels customers. Leaders should be stern, but kind; bold, but gracious.
At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're here to help your business figure this out, and to provide holistic solutions.
β
β
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
β
So if you feel resistance about executing a certain ending, figure out what two or more desires are in conflict, admit to yourself that you can have only one, and then ask yourself this question: Which one am I willing to give up to have the other one?
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
In the language of Ecclesiastes, are there situations in business or in life where you are trying to birth things that should be dying? Trying to heal something that should be killed off? Laughing at something that you should be weeping about? Embracing something (or someone) you should shun? Searching for an answer for something when it is time to give up? Continuing to try to love something or someone when it is time to talk about what you hate?
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
You get teamwork in the workplace by giving teamwork in the workplace. It's not only about your personal career success or your colleagues' personal career success, but it's also about the success of the company - which is good for everyone employed at the company.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Business Essentials)
β
You canβt prune toward anything if you donβt know what you want. You have to figure out what you are trying to be or build and then define what the pruning standards are going to be. That definition and those standards will bring you to the pruning moments, wherein you either own the vision or you donβt.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
Our society today celebrates entrepreneurship way too much. It's great to be an entrepreneur. But it's also great to be an employee. In order to have a healthy economy, we need both entrepreneurs and employees. We need business of every size and we need people to accept the many jobs offered by those businesses.
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β
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
β
People at McDonaldβs get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs donβt. It makes no sense. Would you want to stand on the line of the untrained person at McDonaldβs? Would you want to use the software written by the engineer who was never told how the rest of the code worked? A lot of companies think their employees are so smart that they require no training. Thatβs silly. When I first became a manager,
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β
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
β
Misconceptions of business are almost inevitable in a society where most people have neither studied nor run businesses. In a society where most people are employees and consumers, it is easy to think of businesses as βthemβ β as impersonal organizations, whose internal operations are largely unknown and whose sums of money may sometimes be so huge as to be unfathomable.
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β
Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy)
β
The code-of-ethics playlist:
o Treat your colleagues, family, and friends with respect, dignity, fairness, and courtesy.
o Pride yourself in the diversity of your experience and know that you have a lot to offer.
o Commit to creating and supporting a world that is free of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.
o Have balance in your life and help others to do the same.
o Invest in yourself, achieve ongoing enhancement of your skills, and continually upgrade your abilities.
o Be approachable, listen carefully, and look people directly in the eyes when speaking.
o Be involved, know what is expected from you, and let others know what is expected from them.
o Recognize and acknowledge achievement.
o Celebrate, relive, and communicate your successes on an ongoing basis.
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Lorii Myers (Targeting Success, Develop the Right Business Attitude to be Successful in the Workplace (3 Off the Tee, #1))
β
In the United States, government regulations are estimated to cost about $7,800 per employee in large businesses and about $10,600 per employee in small businesses.{662} Among other things, this suggests that the existence of numerous government regulations tends to give competitive advantages to big business, since there are apparently economies of scale in complying with these regulations.
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Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy)
β
There is a difference between helping someone who is disabled, incapable, or otherwise infirm versus helping someone who is resisting growing up and taking care of what every adult (or child, for that matter) has to be responsible for: herself or himself. When you find yourself in any way paying for someone elseβs responsibilities, not only are you stuck with a delayed ending, but you are probably harming that person.
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Henry Cloud (Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward)
β
There really are two Americas, one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money.
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β
Matt Taibbi (Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America)
β
Under-slept employees are not, therefore, going to drive your business forward with productive innovation. Like a group of people riding stationary exercise bikes, everyone looks like they are pedaling, but the scenery never changes. The irony that employees miss is that when you are not getting enough sleep, you work less productively and thus need to work longer to accomplish a goal. This means you often must work longer and later into the evening, arrive home later, go to bed later, and need to wake up earlier, creating a negative feedback loop. Why try to boil a pot of water on medium heat when you could do so in half the time on high? People often tell me that they do not have enough time to sleep because they have so much work to do. Without wanting to be combative in any way whatsoever, I respond by informing them that perhaps the reason they still have so much to do at the end of the day is precisely because they do not get enough sleep at night.
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Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams)
β
Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?
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β
Alain de Botton (The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work)
β
Investors are people with more money than time.
Employees are people with more time than money.
Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens.
Startups are business experiments performed with other peopleβs money.
Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.β
βCompany culture is what goes without saying.
There are no real rules, only laws.
Success forgives all sins.
People who leak to you, leak about you.
Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade.
Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society.
Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics.
Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities.
Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every playerβinvestor, employee, entrepreneur, consumerβis complicit.
β
β
Antonio GarcΓa MartΓnez (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley)
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Let us consider the power of FAITH, as it is now being demonstrated, by a man who is well known to all of civilization, Mahatma Gandhi, of India. In this man the world has one of the most astounding examples known to civilization, of the possibilities of FAITH. Gandhi wields more potential power than any man living at this time, and this, despite the fact that he has none of the orthodox tools of power, such as money, battle ships, soldiers, and materials of warfare. Gandhi has no money, he has no home, he does not own a suit of clothes, but HE DOES HAVE POWER. How does he come by that power? HE CREATED IT OUT OF HIS UNDERSTANDING OF THE PRINCIPLE OF FAITH, AND THROUGH HIS ABILITY TO TRANSPLANT THAT FAITH INTO THE MINDS OF TWO HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE. Gandhi has accomplished, through the influence of FAITH, that which the strongest military power on earth could not, and never will accomplish through soldiers and military equipment. He has accomplished the astounding feat of INFLUENCING two hundred million minds to COALESCE AND MOVE IN UNISON, AS A SINGLE MIND. What other force on earth, except FAITH could do as much? There will come a day when employees as well as employers will discover the possibilities of FAITH. That day is dawning. The whole world has had ample opportunity, during the recent business depression, to witness what the LACK OF FAITH will do to business.
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Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich)
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The travails of being an employee include not only uncertainty about the duration of one's employment, but also the humiliation of many working practices and dynamics. With most businesses shaped like pyramids, in which a wide base of employees gives way to a narrow tip of managers, the question of who will be rewarded - and who left behind - typically develops into one of the most oppressive of the workplace, and one which, like all anxieties, feeds off uncertainty. Because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its oppositie can acquire an apparently haphazard connection to results. The succesful alpinist of organizational pyramids may not be the best at their jobs, but those who have best mastered a range of dark political arts in which civilized life does not usually offer instruction.
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Alain de Botton (Status Anxiety)
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Of the twelve, the most powerful questions (to employees, guaging their satisfaction with their employers) are those witha combination of the strongest links to the most business outcomes (to include profitability). Armed with this perspective, we now know that the following six ar ethe most powerful questions:
1) Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2) Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3) Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4) In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
5) Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6) Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
As a manager, if you want to know what you should do to build a strong and productive workplace, securing 5s to these six questions would be an excellent place to start.
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Marcus Buckingham
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Google gets $59 billion, and you get free search and e-mail. A study published by the Wall Street Journal in advance of Facebookβs initial public offering estimated the value of each long-term Facebook user to be $80.95 to the company. Your friendships were worth sixty-two cents each and your profile page $1,800. A business Web page and its associated ad revenue were worth approximately $3.1 million to the social network. Viewed another way, Facebookβs billion-plus users, each dutifully typing in status updates, detailing his biography, and uploading photograph after photograph, have become the largest unpaid workforce in history. As a result of their free labor, Facebook has a market cap of $182 billion, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has a personal net worth of $33 billion. What did you get out of the deal? As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier reminds us, a company such as Instagramβwhich Facebook bought in 2012βwas not valued at $1 billion because its thirteen employees were so βextraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.β Its inventory is personal dataβyours and mineβwhich it sells over and over again to parties unknown around the world. In short, youβre a cheap date.
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Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
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In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in β or more precisely not in β the countryβs businesses and banks. This inventory β it should perhaps be called the bezzle β amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.
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Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.
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John Kenneth Galbraith (The Great Crash 1929)