A couple weeks ago, I was in a flower shop, buying flowers for myself so that others would think someone loved me. I was browsing, trying to remember what my favorite color was, when a lady entered in a perfect fury. She was seething, livid, beside herself with rage because the arrangement she had received…
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How Our Current Generational Model Is Failing Us At this point, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Millennial thing has been talked to death. Billions of words have been written about Millennials, how they differ from their Baby Boomer and Gen X antecedents, and how companies need to change in order to attract Millennial…
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Because A Good Title Is Hard To Find In the next few weeks I’ll be launching my new keynote about how to deliver an exceptional customer experience. It’s called Decoding Your Customers!, which only took about 4 months for me to decide on. It took almost as long to come up with the title as…
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I’m experimenting with those annoying headlines they run on news sites now. “Kid eats pancakes, and then this happens…” What do you think? Anyway, there are an absurd number of people billing themselves as ‘innovation experts.’ Many of them have worked for successful companies, and so what they’re really doing is going around and telling…
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So my wife and I are pregnant. I know some people take issue with me saying it that way, since technically she is the only one who is carrying a baby, but I feel like I’m a part of this process too. I get to wake up at night almost every time she does, I…
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‘Tis the season to squeeze as much money out of your customers as humanly possible! I know that’s not the standard phrase – it’s ‘tis the season to eat jelly,’ in case you were wondering – but the desire to trick people into paying us is always hiding just under the surface. You can hear…
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Maybe you’re staring at next year’s numbers and wondering if your business is going to keep growing. Maybe your company is going through a merger. Maybe you’re getting a divorce. And maybe you just won the lottery and are trying to figure out how to keep everyone you’ve ever known from hitting you up for…
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We just wanted to share a few quick clips of what we worked on this year and we hope you had a great 2018, both personally and professionally.
First off, let me say that I’m sorry for using the term ‘Gen Z’ in this title. Personally, I don’t think Generation Z exists. Somewhere along the line we decided that we were inventing a new type of people every 15 years or so, and I just don’t agree. However, that’s the language we use,…
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We’ve gotten very fond of saying that business conditions are more challenging now than they’ve ever been. The Internet, you know, and globalization, and technology, and political unrest, and on and on and on until it seems like everything is always on the verge of total collapse. Built into all of this is the implication…
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Jeff Havens is a keynote speaker offering serious solutions while being seriously funny. Occassionally comments come in that don’t get highlighted, but these were too funny not to share!
There’s a good chance that you aren’t in love with your job. Most of us aren’t. In the United States, approximately 70% of us are disengaged at work, and that number is actually pretty good compared to other countries. According to a recent Gallup poll, 94% of Chinese and Japanese workers dislike what they do.…
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Last weekend my wife and I took our 20-month-old son to a pumpkin farm. We did this because the weather was perfect and because we live in the Midwest. Finding a pumpkin farm or apple orchard in the fall is about as Midwestern as eating an elephant ear at the county fair. This particular farm…
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Recently a friend of mine – and by that I mean ‘way too many people I know, but this article will flow better if I pretend I’m talking about a single person’ – told me that he’s miserable in his job. He’s working far too many hours with no relief in sight, sees no opportunity…
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Time for some levity! If you’re looking for a serious, career-building article, we’ve got one of those for you. But if you’d like a little goofiness, then you’ve come to the right place! So my wife’s birthday was a couple weeks ago. She turned 33, which you’re probably thinking is pronounced ‘thirty-three’ but in our…
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Recently my wife and I got into an argument about something. It’s the same something we have occasionally argued about for just about as long as we have been together, and it ended the same way it always does – both of us frustrated, no progress made. It’s as though we periodically say, “Things are…
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My brother takes forever to make a decision. Not always, of course; it’s not like he stays naked until 3pm because he can’t decide what to wear. But he did once take two years to buy a couch. That’s not an exaggeration. From the time he decided he needed a new couch to the time…
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Recently a friend of mine treated himself and his wife to a new mattress, which is the most boring way to begin an article that I can think of. Dinner? No. A romantic vacation? No. How about shopping for a way to more comfortably be unconscious? Woo-hoo! Oh, and by the way, I’m not saying…
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This morning I made the mistake that almost all of us make in our first hour of consciousness – I checked my Facebook account and scanned the headlines. Consequently I learned the following: a friend of mine is leaving today for a two-month vacation to Singapore; the United States has a list of 59 terror…
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My wife and I got into an argument this weekend about how we should be spending time with our son. Sounds like fun, right? That sentence might have conjured up images of wild shouting, doors slamming, and the hours of frosty silence that often follow heated arguments. And with good reason, since all of that…
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For the past eight years, I have delivered a leadership presentation called Unleash Your Inner Tyrant! at conferences across 48 states, 7 Canadian provinces, and six Latin American countries. In that presentation, I pretend to encourage my audience to engage in all kinds of terrible leadership practices – outsourcing blame, avoiding contact with employees, making…
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