Business Etiquette BLOOPERS!
We recently filmed three new video series for Levity University on Business Communications, Behavior, and Dress Code. Fortunately for your viewing pleasure we messed up a lot. Enjoy!
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Turning Irritation Into Opportunity
I don’t know you very well, but I’m confident that something soon will annoy you. Annoying things are everywhere – obnoxious family members, slow traffic, stupid rules, pointless meetings, and at least 4 billion other things that collectively make all of us occasionally wonder why we don’t just go find an island somewhere and live…
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The 12 Days After Winter Break
In a slight departure for me, this one is meant to be sung to the tune of “12 Days of Christmas.” Hope you enjoy. On the first day after winter break my colleagues gave to me…. A two-hour call with IT. On the second day after winter break my colleagues gave to me…. Two performance…
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The Truth About Making Or Breaking A Habit
It’s the end of the year again, which means that once again everybody is going to at least think about making some major life changes. Eat right, exercise, stop smoking, read more, finally buy that walrus you’ve been talking about getting for five years – I don’t know what your particular resolutions are going to…
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Jeff’s New Year’s Resolutions
Hello, everyone! Well, I’ve been putting this off for a year now, but it’s finally time. Over the past few months I’ve realized that I’m a dull and boring person, riddled with problems and flaws and rickets and probably some other things, which is why I’m preparing to do a complete overhaul as we head…
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The Only 4 Ways to Create a Vibrant Culture
As I’m sure you’ve heard before, creating a good culture is enormously difficult. At least it’s often presented that way. Companies are made up of dozens of moving parts, and those parts sometimes wake up in a crappy mood or get divorced or decide they want to work somewhere else. Structuring everything in a way…
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How to Create An Awful Company Culture
So hopefully you read my companion article about the four keys to creating a good, happy, vibrant, gosh-it’s-nice-to-work-here company culture. Because if you didn’t the title for this one probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. Who would want to create an awful culture? Nobody, really, except for sociopaths and evil supervillains. And yet awful…
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The Benefit of Doing Something Drastic
A couple weeks ago I delivering the opening keynote at an agricultural conference. For those of who don’t know, theirs is an industry currently facing significant challenges. A combination of unusually uncooperative weather and unprecedented policy decisions have simultaneously depressed crop supply and prices. Farming is a difficult business, and farmers today are having a…
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Time to Turn the Tables on Professional Ghosting
In honor of this being the month of Halloween, we are going to discuss how to handle ghosts. Not the spooky, incorporeal kind – the best way to handle that kind is by screaming and running away, unless of course you have a plasma cannon calibrated for the proper ectoplasmic frequency, and I’m guessing you…
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The Simple Difference Between Effective and Ineffective Visions
One of the most important skills a leader needs to develop is the ability to articulate a vision that employees can attach to and rally around. (Indeed, the word ‘vision’ is such a common part of leadership education that I wouldn’t be surprised if you occasionally have visions about creating a vision.) Having a strong…
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Interested in Meeting New People? Give These Ideas a Try!
Meeting new people is a pain. Not that new people are inherently annoying (although some of them are), but figuring out how to meet them is exhausting. Of course you’re interesting and fun and charismatic and you smell great too, and if you could just start in the middle of the relationship, everyone would realize…
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What To Work On When Business Is Slow
Every summer I completely understand why tropical countries tend to move at a slower pace than ones further from the equator. Of course the Vikings went on raiding expeditions – what else were they going to do during nine months of Nordic winters? I live in Michigan, where we only get six months of decent…
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Maybe I Trusted My Personality Assessment Too Much
I just got the results back from my first personality assessment, and guess what? I’m Intuitive! I’m also a Planner, and I’m Conflict Averse. I knew that last one, ever since my MMA career ended before I ever began training for it, but it was a surprise to learn that I like having things organized…
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The Paradox of Freedom
When I was a high school teacher, I had a 15-year-old Kurdish student in my 9th-grade English class. He was a terrible student, constantly disrespectful and disruptive, completely uninterested in learning, and a huge challenge to my newly-minted teacher self. I spent far too much time trying to stop him from derailing my entire class,…
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Look At All The Perks I Have!
Tech companies get a lot of attention for offering some crazy awesome perks to their employees. Google has on-site masseuses, and Epic Health Systems has a building with a three-story slide in it and another one designed to look like a Dungeons & Dragons game. In fact, these types of perks have gotten so much…
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The Value of Not Working
In my Uncrapify Your Future! keynote, I talk about one of the biggest paradoxes of modern work – namely, that productivity doesn’t always look productive. We are accustomed to valuing things we can see, like typing on a computer or turning a wrench, and so we are often far less impressed by things that don’t…
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Where “Following My Passion” Got Me
By now I’m sure you’ve had somebody tell you to follow your passion. There are entire TED talks, by (inexplicably) respected speakers, telling people that the secret to life is to find what makes you happy and then build everything else around that. They say it blithely, like it’s the easiest thing in the world.…
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A Thank You to the Doctors Who Saved My Daughter’s Life
I ordinarily don’t write much about my personal life in my newsletters. My job is to talk about business growth – and while there are plenty of parallels between what we do at work and what we do at home, I prefer to keep personal examples to a minimum because everyone’s experience is unique, and…
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5 Secrets to Telling Someone They Smell Bad
Hello, and welcome to one of the most difficult jobs you might ever be unfortunate enough to face – telling somebody they smell bad. I’ll be honest, I’m amazed and saddened by how often someone has asked me how to do this. Apparently there are millions of people blindingly unaware of their own foulness. Why…
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Results Vs. Process – What Matters More?
There are hundreds of arguments that divide us. Soda vs. pop, potato vs. potato – that one makes more sense when you can hear it – red state vs. blue state, and I could go on. I myself have been involved in endless arguments with people about exactly which animal is the cutest one alive…
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How My Father Taught Me To Conquer the Fear of Failure
Somewhere pretty close to 35 years ago this month, I learned how to ride a bicycle. I’d like to pretend that I remember such a pivotal moment in life like it was yesterday, but obviously that’s not true since I don’t even remember exactly when it happened. (Nor do I remember what I did yesterday.)…
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