Imagine landing a new job in a new place – a place that’s more than a thousand miles over water from where you’ve spent your entire life. You’re excited about the adventure. So you pack up everything youown, including your car, and have it shipped to your new home, eager to start your new life. Now imagine seeing that dream – the American Dream – slip like sand through your fingers be...

Taking a leadership style quiz won’t make you a great leader, but it will give you some of the insights you need to start developing your leadership into something greater than it already is. We all lead with style. For some of us, our leadership style is sort of like bellbottom jeans or parachute pants – a bit dated. We need a new wardrobe. Many of us, on the other hand, pay close attention to the trends tha...

If there’s one thing Joe Teno knows with great certainty, it’s that he knows nothing with great certainty. And that’s a good thing to keep in mind if you want to help build an innovative culture. “I’m a firm believer in not knowing,” Teno says. “All things that have potential reside on this edge between knowing and not knowing.” But this much we know: As president of At...

Bernie Swain is the man who knows everyone. Not literally, mind you, but I’ve never met anyone who knows more people worth knowing than the co-founder of the Washington Speakers Bureau. He’s worked with and befriended almost every person of influence in our modern era–three of the past four U.S. presidents, the last four prime ministers of Great Britain, five secretaries of state, and just about ever...

If you listen to politicians, especially those aspiring to live in the big, white home on Pennsylvania Avenue, you might think your happiness is directly tied to their victory in the election.Turns out, that’s not big factor; having control over your time is.Sure, policies from on high may occasionally affect your day-to-day feelings. But the president of the United States isn’t going to tell you it’s OK to take off a few h...

If we want to make our customers love us, then we … well, wait a minute … Scratch that. We can’t make our customers love us. We can’t make anyone love us. That’s simply not how it works. Love is a gift we freely give and that’s freely given back to us. The same applies to our business or to any other enterprise or organization. So if we want our customers to love us – our brand...

Byron Stephens has helped Marco’s Pizza grow to more than 700 stores in 35 states and three countries. That type of expansion often kills a culture; in fact, while Marco’s growth numbers looked great on paper, employee morale began to nosedive.As an organization, they were falling victim to the classic “Growth Trap.”Stephens joined Marco’s Pizza in 2004 when it was a successful but regional chain operating 110 stores in thr...

[I’m happy to share this guest post from my friend and colleague, Michael Kennedy—a veteran of the automotive industry and renowned automotive recruiter. Aside from the specific statistics, the challenges and solutions that follow apply to all industries. Read on! –SF] Car dealerships, like many other organizations across the nation, continue to face a hiring and retention epidemic. They’ve figured out how to move a lot of...

Some of us remember the days when we could lock ourselves in the office, turn off the phone, and put the outside world on hold. But now—what with texts, social media updates, instant messages, and the incessant vibrating and chiming of our mobile devices that deliver them—we are always connected.Or are we?Ironically, the very technology that is designed to connect us with one another often separates us from our team and pre...

[Note to my readers: I first wrote and published this post four years ago in our last US presidential election cycle. Just out of curiosity, I flipped back into my blog archives to see if what I’d written then would still apply.Well, what do you know? Seems to me that, given this particularly unusual and contentious election contest, it’s even more relevant today.Whether you’re leaning left, right, or other–politically spea...