Dealing With Workplace Babies
“A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.” – Mark Twain What do you do with a chronic complainer, an employee who is always dumping his problems on you? Please note: I’m not talking about the industrious individual who has a rare and significant problem that forces him to come…
How to Defeat the Insidious Green Monster
“The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better himself.” – Helmut Schoeck ETR reader Greg A. wants to know how to deal with “family or friends that seem to want you to fail… if a great break in your plan…
2 Sales Secrets That Can Improve Your Personal Life
“My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.” – Winston Churchill If you could spend a day in the offices of today’s most successful businesspeople, you’d find that they rely on a few surprisingly simple secrets to make more sales than…
Stop Your Partners From Taking a Mile
“In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.” – Iris Murdoch Being successful in business is often a result of the deals you make.…
The Most Important Quality of a Top Employee
“Focus on where you want to go, not on what you fear.” – Anthony Robbins To an outsider, it might have seemed a very easy choice. Good Guy Greg, one candidate for the job of heading up the project, was very professional, a tough negotiator, dogged, determined, and principled. The…
A Positive Approach to Dealing With Negative People
“People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.” – Abraham Lincoln Not long ago, I happened to meet a lovely woman who, like me, was selling her house. We started to have a nice chat, and she told me that she was selling the place…
How to Handle Being Badmouthed at Work
Handle being badmouthed at work by remembering that what is said about you behind your back says more about the speaker than it does about you.
Charm and Charisma
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou Today I’d like to tell you about a simple step you can take to make a huge positive change in both your…
When Helping People Hurts
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be; / For loan oft loses both itself and friend, / And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.” – Polonius, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet I have a weakness for helping people. Helping someone in need makes me feel stronger and better somehow. But helping is…
Working Well With Others
“Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” – Vince Lombardi A 20-year study at Stanford University examined the career paths of thousands of executives to determine the qualities they had developed that enabled them…
The Secret Power of the Japanese
“Appearances are a glimpse of the unseen.” – Anaxagoras Earlier, I wrote about the great service we received during our stay in China. I didn’t honestly think it could get any better – but the way we have been treated at the Four Seasons (Marunouchi) in Tokyo has topped it.…
Keeping the U in USP
In marketing, we call the unique aspect of a product’s (or service’s) personality its Unique Selling Proposition or USP. It’s what makes it stand out from the competition and give consumers a reason to buy it. And the more unique (better differentiated) it is, the more others may want to emulate it.