The Productivity Guru

Whether or not you agree with the reopening of the economies in your state or country, it seems to be a coming reality.  Ultimately that means that at some point now or in the future, you will probably begin to be back on the road again.  Zoom'ing may exist but those who have worked in most businesses, know that being able to look your client in the eye is still the best way to do business. So, in preparation of being back on the road, the following article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on cleaning your hotel room.  Now most of us would think that the hotel would do that; some will do a great job, some will do an average job and some will do a sub-par job.  We all at one time or another have been in a 4 or 5 star hotel and still found a situation of less than the cleanliness we expected. So to provide you with some thoughts on this subject, I thought this article was timely. https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-you-need-to-clean-when-youre-staying-at-a-hot...

 My last post was on the same subject Zoombombing.  There are some great activities occurring here like groups of singers from the Met Opera in New York to others doing jazz, etc.  All of which are intended to keep our moods up.  Other use Zoom for taking care of business.  I recently came across this series of simple steps in the New York Times to follow which should help you truly avoid being bombed.  Take a good view and see if you are following all the steps to avoid this problem in your meetings and or virtual events. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/style/zoom-security-tips.html?searchResultPosition=7 Talk to you all soon.  Stay safe, stay healthy and stay sane.

Undoubtedly, I am just like the vast majority of the population, I am at home in quarantine.  To all those who are still working, whether you are medical professionals, grocery and drug store staff, first responders, mail personnel or any number of others--THANK YOU!! To those of you who are working from home, I had begun collecting a series of articles about this exact situation but I started before we even heard the words Coronavirus.  So I am going to take the opportunity over the new 2 weeks to send these out.  I hope you like these and find them useful.  If you are already a subscriber of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or another journal that I picked out these articles from, you may have already read them.  For those of you who have not read them, they are quite informative. The first one comes from a recent Wall Street Journal and is entitled "Don't Get Bombed: How to Hose Zoom Meetings, Hangouts, Houseparty and More."  Thank you...

In today's environment of tight employment, I found this effort by the management of this company to be refreshing and above all, intelligent.  It helps to solve one of the bigger problems businesses in America are currently being confronted with.  While undoubtedly doing something like this in your own company, the benefits will be substantial to your organization, but also to your local economy amongst others.  Thank you Ruth Simon for writing this excellent piece and to the Wall Street Journal for publishing it.  At Nehemiah Manufacturing, workers with a criminal past are the norm. But the company has learned that giving someone a job is just half the battle.   By Ruth Simon  | Photographs by Andrew Spear for The Wall Street Journal Jan. 25, 2020 12:00 am ET SAVE SHARE TEXT 198 RESPONSES CINCINNATI—While some companies try to attract and keep employees with yoga classes and lavish cafe...

You may have noticed that I took some time off from this blog.  Well, I am back; ready and raring to go in continuing my quest to help CEO's and businesses worldwide to improve their productivity.   Hopefully, I will be adding to this site important and appropriate material at least once a week, if not more often.

As I said in my last posting, CEO's and other executives go to many different trainings and get great ideas about how to better understand their people.  This is whether they are C-Suite Executives, Middle Managers, Supervisors or the workers who actually make it all work.  No matter, they come back invigorated with fresh and new ideas and for the most part they fail to put those great ideas into practice.  I said in my last posting this was very common.  I had seen it time and time again over my 45 years of experience.  Why does this happen and what do you do to fix this? It's really rather simple.  I could say, don't let it happen and you would all say I was crazy.  But that really is the solution.  What I always did with a new client fresh into the project was determine what they wanted to do or to change.  Perhaps it came as a result of a training class they did with me or with someone else, but we set up a goal or a set of goals t...

Oh, My Goodness, is it Affect or Effect?? You know it's got to be good when an article is originally written for and posted from Entrepreneur.com and then is reposted to a Harvard Business Review blog.  From there it is posted to a LinkedIn.com blog and then to my humble publication.  But here it is, a really good piece by Travis Bradberry, the award-winning co-author of the best selling book, "Emotional Intelligence 2.0", entitled "10 Misused Words That Make Smart People Look Stupid." We all have a tendency to throw words around.  They can be big words, important words and many times they are not terribly important words that we run amuck with like--affect or effect.  Bradberry's article and the points he makes in regard to today's millennial's are just as valid as they are with many of today's senior executives as with new hires.  We've lost our ability to be as articulate as we once were.  This occurs in the written as well as the spo...