Christmas in southwest Florida is the beginning of tourist season. While much of the rest of the country shovels snow, we enjoy moderate temperatures and sunny skies. On Friday evening, my wife and I decided to try out Parrot Key, an upper scale seafood eatery in a tropical Caribbean theme down at the beach.....

Our tag line reads “Reach Further, Accomplish More, Work Less.” That is, after all, the objective of developing capable people - to expand your influence, get more done, and do less of the grunt work yourself. It would seem to logically follow that the best way to do this would be to raise up a cadre...

  Effective leaders know that enough is enough We love to talk. We came from the manufacturer that way. It seems that leaders are talkers. Indeed, some languages have no word that would translate “leader”. Their word is orator, one who speaks eloquently. So we tend to say things…a lot of things. But perhaps there...

On the Velocity Channel I watched a reality show about a classic car restoration shop in Canada. In the episode I saw, the owners of the shop had hired an apprentice mechanic. After a few months on the job they considered him worthy of increased responsibilities, so they gave him a project to manage. As...

You are the owner/manager of a retail department store. Your store is busy so high sales volume also means a lot of returns. One of the new employees is tasked with handling the checkout register and for restocking items as they are returned when checkout traffic permits. The employee has gone through the company’s orientation...

  It was an embarrassing display. I was in a another city working for a non-profit organization. The organization’s director , I'll call him Clark, and I were at a local restaurant for dinner. The waitress was having a difficult time that evening and got a couple of things wrong. I watched in stunned disbelief...

When the Second Continental Congress convened on June 7, 1776, the pressing order of business was a resolution drafted by Richard Henry Lee calling for a declaration of independence from Great Britain. It was the culmination of many months effort by the more fervent members of the Congress, the driving force being John Adams of...

President Kennedy once hosted a gathering of about 50 Nobel Prize winners at the White House, and he said, "This is probably the greatest collection of talent and human knowledge ever assembled in this place, except for when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." The contest for the most influential people in America always includes Thomas Jefferson....

“Good luck on your new position,” said the outgoing chairman. “You’ll start heading towards your objectives, look behind you, and find no one there.” “I don’t know why no one will help,” complained another leader. “Surely they can see I am overloaded. I can’t understand why they don’t step up and pitch in.” If there...