TGIF – The Boss Got It Right When He Sang About The “Human Touch”

As the week winds down, we wind down with some tidbits for your information, education, health, and enjoyment.

Quote of the Week: “So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.” Peter Drucker

Humor Break:

Bev: Al, I am reading this article and it refers to three types of fear, but it doesn’t say what they are. Do you know?

Al: Yeah, “Terror”, “Panic” and the boss says “We need to talk”.

Stat of the Week: Jay Deragon in his blog The Relationship Economy quotes some mighty fascinating stats from an 11-year study by John P. Kotter and James L. Haskett that included 207 companies in 22 industries. Deregon wrote “The results showed that companies that managed their corporate culture significantly outperformed similar companies that did not.” Here are some of those differences:

1. Revenue growth of 682 percent (managed) compared to 166 percent (unmanaged)
2. Stock price increase of 901 percent compared to 74 percent
3. Job growth of 282 percent compared to 36 percent
4. Net income growth of 756 percent compared to just 1 percent

Action Tip: More of a wonderment than an action tip, but I am more than a little curious about a statistic I presented in a previous post about 6 million start-ups a year in the United States. Are many of the people behind the start-ups disillusioned, unengaged employees from the unmanaged cultures mentioned above? Eminently logical as Mr. Spock might say.

Self-Development Corner: Next week Coursera, the free online university, offers five courses in French and Chinese. Please click on this Coursera link to look at the selections.

Happy learning.

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.