Learning Center

A new research study from Stanford University and the Harvard Business School has named workplace stress as a contributor to at least 120,000 deaths a year and up to $190 billion in health care costs. 120,000 mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and coworkers who die prematurely, in part, due to work environments that are allowed to remain toxic. ...

We are forgetful creatures. I’m not referring to the “senior moment” variety of forgetfulness. I’m talking about the habitual forgetting that takes place in the midst of everyday life challenges and stresses, when we “forget” to make those choices that we know will keep our bodies, spirits and relationships healthy. We forget that change can only happen today and not ...

Advances in brain imaging technologies are extending the reach of scientific comprehension into the complex and fascinating recesses of human motivation. By studying detailed pictures of the brain’s responses to different situations neuroscientists are changing our understanding of why people act the way they do. Business leaders have an opportunity to translate these discoveries about human motivation into organizational cultures ...

There is nothing better than an impending disaster to clarify the distinction between the essential and the trivial. When total annihilation is on the horizon no one is wasting any time worrying about whether it’s going to rain this weekend. The standard formula for disaster movies builds upon the stark choices offered by the threat of total calamity. In response ...

Organizations are on a quest to identify the essential elements of employee engagement. They dream of building cultures and work environments that will capture every last ounce of employee discretionary effort. They want employees who arrive at work every day with all the optimism, ambition and enthusiasm that they brought on their first day believing that happy people create more ...

One of my best management experiences was coaching my son’s Little League baseball team. I may not be able to remember the name of the movie with what’s-his-name in it that I saw last week but I can tell you the name of each kid on the team and what position they played. That group played hard and had a ...

A few years ago one of our client companies merged with their biggest competitor and they asked us to facilitate some preliminary meetings with the other management group which, until the merger, had been their rivals. There was much anxiety in both management groups about how to merge the two very different, adversarial and extremely competitive cultures. Andrew, a senior ...

Did you hear the story about the fellow who was walking through the Broadway theater district in New York and was accosted by a frantic stage manager? The stage manager told him that he needed to find a replacement for an actor that had suddenly come down with a case of laryngitis. The curtain was going up in 10 minutes ...

In 1982, Zingerman’s Deli served their first magnificent overstuffed sandwich in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The founders, Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw, were united by their dream of the perfect corn beef on rye. That year was my (lucky) 13th year in Ann Arbor and I just couldn’t get enough of their insanely addictive food. I left Ann Arbor in 1983, ...

Three years ago this month Microsoft shut down its Encarta website and acknowledged the obvious – that its encyclopedia had absolutely no chance of competing with Wikipedia. In 2009, Wikipedia – a free collaborative project – was getting 97% of the online encyclopedia visits in the United States. Encarta, after 16 years of trying, was a distant second with 1.27% ...

Thank you Ira Glass. For those of you who do not know Mr. Glass, he is the creative force behind  ”This American Life”  which is an insanely good and quirky  radio program on NPR. Ira is a consummate story teller but this wasn’t always the case. In a jewel of a video, he describes the sizeable gap between his taste in ...