I AM HOPEFUL YOU HAD A GREAT FOURTH OF JULY!

“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

Thomas Jefferson

 “Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.”

Albert Camus

  Flakes, Heretics and Jerks

What to do when the smartest people in the company are your worst employees? Ben Horowitz in a Wired Magazine article excerpted from his book“The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers” has a few suggestions for dealing with “Flakes, Heretics and Jerks.”  (Any Dennis Rodmans or Terrell Owens on your team?)

 Chemical Conversations

Check out this one page article from HBR on the Neurochemistry of Positive Conversations. The author asks “Why do negative comments and conversations stick with us so much longer than positive ones?” It turns out that the reason is chemical…and we can alter how others “chemically react” to us with a few simple changes in our own behavior.This is something you can start using tomorrow to “harness the chemistry of conversations.”

Freelancers at the Gate

Over the past twenty years the percentage of the workforce classified as “freelance” has grown from 7% to 15%. You have a strategy for managing employees; do you have one for managing freelancers? Check out this brief article from Forbes on where the labor market is headed, the role that freelancers will play in it, and what you need to do to get ready for it.

Improvising in No Man’s Land.

Last Friday, Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Josh Harrison put on a rare display of the virtue of not giving up too soon in the 10th inning against the New York Mets. Stranded between second and third during the 10th inning … Josh Harrison knew he was in no-man’s land. So the Bucs’ electric utility man improvised.  Watch this amazing base running play and ask yourself  how you and your team respond when the heat is on. As one sports writer commented: “Most players give up when they’re on the run-down, Harrison didn’t. What a play!”

Econ Recon: Your Peers, their Fears

The Vistage Confidence Index for Q2 has just been released.The extent of the revised GDP falloff in the first quarter (some say due to weather) caught many economists and business people by surprise. Spend a few minutes with this brief recap of how Vistage CEOs see the economy ahead and what they are planning to do.