Posts Tagged ‘work’

Managers, Motivate!

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

This week we have two business books specifically aimed at managers. It’s said that the best companies are those with the best managers. The pressure put on managers to succeed is an unrelenting force making informative resources critical to progress. Former CEO and President of Verizon Wireless, Denny Strigl, and business coach, Brian Tracy, are two authors featured here that have compiled essential methods that promise to supercharge business performance in managers and their teams everywhere.

Managers, Can You Hear Me Now?: Hard-Hitting Lessons on How to Get Real Results by Denny Strigl and Frank Swiatek

For managers, behavior is the real key to achievement. In order to stop struggling and start delivering, you need to close the gap between what you know and what you do. That’s been Denny Strigl’s method, and now it can be yours, too.

Among the most prominent architects of the wireless communications industry, the former Verizon Wireless president and CEO has had one of the most remarkable careers in modern business. In Managers, Can You Hear Me Now?, Strigl shares all the skills and techniques he used to build Verizon into one of the greatest growth companies in any industry. You’ll learn how to:

  • Create a corporate culture where trust, respect, and integrity flourish — and employees and customers alike are appropriately served
  • “Eliminate the fluff,” get focused, and stop wasting time on things that don’t matter
  • Address issues proactively before they become problems — even employee performance issues
  • Get past your “blind spots,” reinforce priorities consistently, and communicate with clarity
  • Master the Four Fundamentals of Management: growing revenue, getting new customers, keeping the customers you already have, and eliminating costs

Managers, Can You Hear Me Now? includes additional suggestions for bringing the best of your energy and passion into your work, helpful anedcotes from Strigl’s career, simple self-assessment questions, and even a look at how your business day as a successful manager should play out.

Whether you’re the CEO of a large corporation or run your own small business, the lessons from Managers, Can You Hear Me Now? are sure to come through — loud and clear.

Managers, Can You Hear Me Now?: Hard-Hitting Lessons on How to Get Real Results from McGraw-Hill is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Full Engagement!: Inspire, Motivate, and Bring Out the Best in Your People by Brian Tracy

As a manager, it’s your role to achieve the highest possible return on the physical, emotional, and mental efforts your people put forth. It’s not a return on investment. . . it’s a return on energy. But how are you supposed to light a fire under each employee when studies find that most of them are working at only a fraction of their potential?

In this essential guide, Brian Tracy, the Master of Motivation, shows you how to unlock superstar performance from every single member of your work team. Based on decades of research and thousands of hours invested in maximizing personal and organizational performance, the hard and fast secrets of what you can do (and what you should stop doing) to inspire your employees to peak performance are now available. Packed with powerful, practical ideas and strategies, Full Engagement! shows you how to:

  • create a high-trust work environment
  • drive out the fears that hold people back
  • set clear goals and objectives
  • unlock the potential of each person
  • motivate and inspire employees to greater heights than they ever believed themselves capable of
  • trigger the “X Factor” that maximizes productivity
  • recognize, reward, and reinforce their efforts in a way that energizes each and every one of your people

Your ability to channel the human energies of your staff into higher levels of productivity and performance is the yardstick by which your ability as an executive will be measured.

The great news is that now you have everything you need right in your hands. In this eye-opening book, you’ll learn how to do and say the things that will make your people feel confident, happy, and motivated. . . and allow you to deliver consistently outstanding results for your company.

In these tough economic times, everyone is expected to produce more with less. The only way to succeed is to consistently inspire your people to perform at their absolute best. Full Engagement! provides you with the keys to unlocking not just the hidden drive and abilities that exist within every one of your people. . . but also your own.

Full Engagement!: Inspire, Motivate, and Bring Out the Best in Your People from AMACOM is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Author Spotlight: Lewis Richmond

Sunday, March 20th, 2011
From the constant push and pull in our personal and work lives, it’s a disappointing fact that many people find well-being and happiness far from reach.  Through Buddhism and Zen meditation, Lewis Richmond aims to educate people and encourage sufferers of daily life to discover what healthy awakenings await those who take bold steps and traverse new spiritual terrain.
Lewis Richmond is a Buddhist teacher, Aging and Elderhood author, and Blogger. Lewis leads a Zen meditation group, Vimala Sangha, and teaches at workshops and retreats throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.  He has published three books, including the national bestseller Work as a Spiritual Practice.  Lewis also leads a discussion on aging as a spiritual practice at  Tricycle magazine’s online community site and is the author of the blog,  Aging As A Spiritual Practice, where he regularly writes on topics such as aging, fear, beauty, spiritual practice, gratitude, and kinds of Buddhism to name a few.
Work as a Spiritual Practice by Lewis Richmond manages to complete the task of incorporating spiritual practice within the workplace.  As a veteran corporate executive and former Zen Buddhist priest, Lewis is in an authoritative position to claim that not only is work and meditation a partnership made possible in the office, but through recognizing four characteristics of human thought and emotion, an opportunity for inner growth is completely within grasp. Work as a Spiritual Practice from Broadway is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and IndieBound.

  • “leaving the house without one or the other of Lewis’s practices in mind is like venturing into the wilderness without my boots.”

–Peter Coyote, movie actor and author of Sleeping Where I Fall

  • “This book on utilizing the workplace as a place for spiritual growth comes straight from the workshop of the heart”

–Lama Surya Das, author of Awakening the Buddha Within

  • “An exquisite guide to finding happiness and health in one’s work.”

–NAPRA ReView

  • “an accessible, personal, witty, and poetic book that will be helpful, even transformative, for anyone who works for a living.”

–Sylvia Boorstein, author of It’s Easier Than  You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness

Read Lewis Richmond:

Lewis Richmond:

  • was the Executive Vice President of Smith & Hawken, Ltd.
  • the founder and owner of Forerunner Systems, Inc., the leading provider of inventory management software to the catalog industry.
  • is a musician and composer with a solo piano album, Lake of No Shore, released by Artifex Records.
  • is an ordained disciple of Buddhist master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi.

Connect with Lewis Richmond:


Looking for Balance in a 24/7 World

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

By Fauzia Burke

It is not uncommon for me to get business e-mails at 6:30 a.m. or 12:00 midnight. Until recently, it was also not uncommon for me to answer them. However, this year for my birthday I’ve decided to give myself the gift of balance.

We live in a culture of 24/7 work and it has become normal to many of us. We have raised the expectation of availability to a point that is unhealthy. Recently, a potential client wrote to me on a Saturday, then wrote back on Sunday wondering why I had not e-mailed him back. Another prospective client emailed me at 10:30 on a weeknight and by 8:30 the next morning had written again, a little frustrated, asking for a response. Another person asked to talk to me on a Saturday, and when I informed her that I don’t work on the weekends, she was irritated.

I realized that by trying to always play catch up and accommodate the 24/7 expectations, I was feeling exhausted, overwhelmed and unbalanced. To get some solutions, I turned to an author who has written a book on the challenges we face at work today. I asked Tony Schwartz, author of “The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working,” how to handle the 24/7 expectations. He said, “We can’t control the expectations of others, but we can seek to manage them. Above all, it makes sense to try to invest your energy in what you have the power to influence.”

What I am discovering is that living on this crazy cycle is a choice, being “open” 24/7 is a choice. We ourselves have set up these expectations. Everyone I know seems to be tired and overwhelmed because we are trying to stay ahead of the information overload.

And we are not alone. According to Daniel Patrick Forrester, a client and author of “Consider: Harnessing the Power of Reflective Thinking In Your Organization,” “25 percent of our workdays are spent immersed in information overload.” I asked him for some advice on how to tackle all of the information coming at us.

Information abounds and will forever compound as the world further connects. What we all can do is to force time into our habits and routines to simply think and value reflection as much as we value responding to the onslaught of data that will forever pour over us.

We are taking no time to think, to consider, to plan or to dream. All we are doing is trying to stay ahead of e-mails, Tweets, DM, status updates, LinkedIn invitations and more.

Seth Godin recently wrote a blog called Lost in a Digital World which was retweeted 952 times within 24 hours. He recommends that we turn off the noise and turn on the productivity.

One of the biggest disadvantages of technology is the lack of “thinking time.” Forrester tells us that the reason we have so little time to think is because, “our habitual use of technology and bias for immediacy and rapid response has contributed to fragmenting our attention across many issues at the cost of allowing deep exploration around any one issue.”

Many of us depend on multitasking as the only way to get everything done. However, there is a cost to all this multitasking, I worry that we are doing nothing to the best of our abilities. Schwartz talks about the myth of multitasking: “The brain can’t do cognitive tasks at the same time, so you end up dividing attention between them, as your brain switches back and forth. The result is that you do an injustice to everything, and everyone your splitting time between. We’re sequential beings, not simultaneous. One thing at a time: it’s been around as a basic principle since the dawn of time!”

In the last six months, I have made some small changes in my life. Twice I took two weeks off completely unplugged. To tell you the truth it takes a few days to find a rhythm, a few days to remember how to “be” without the noise, but after that it is blissful. And you know what? The world did not stop, nor did anyone miss me. I just slipped in and out of the river of digital information with no consequences. I found that when I returned I had better ideas, more energy and fully formed thoughts. This year I plan to take more steps for creating balance in my life. Like anything else it’s a choice and like anything new it will take some practice.

Why not join me? I say to my fellow workers, set some office hours and stick to them, take back your lunch hours and unplug during dinners, family times and vacations. We deserve our own time and even more importantly our own attention.