Newsletter topics: Site Traffic, Organization Skills, Human Resources (HR), Effective Management, Innovation, Employment

• 6 Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Website Or Blog 
• Are You Spraying Round Up During The Harvest?
• Social Networking and Employment
• How To Get People To Do What You Want 
• Counter Intuitive
• Don't Even Dream Of Asking For A Raise

 

A strange thing is happening during this recession….. We are not taking advantage of the opportunity that lies in front of us.  Donald Trump and Warren Buffett, both considered to be successful in their businesses, are known to buy low and sell high.  Here at home, my wife is known to take advantage of a “sale.”  A conversation overheard at our house goes something like this: “Honey, do you like my new shoes?  I got them ON SALE.”  Donald Trump is taking advantage of declining prices in real estate to develop more properties that he can put his name on (preferably in big gold letters).  Warren Buffett is taking advantage of the decrease in the cost of materials and services and the increased availability of skilled laborers and capacity for production to invest in companies that are poised for growth and profit.

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If we want to get a teenager to clean their room our first instinct is to tell them to do it.
They are children, we are adults. It is our function to prepare them for life and part of that preparation includes telling them what to do, because we know best.

Yet how often when teenagers are told to clean their rooms do they actually do it?

Unless there is a very heavy threat attached to the order the chance of any teenager actually cleaning their room is practically zero.  We know this because we ourselves never used to clean our rooms and, based on the evidence of our own eyes, neither do our offspring.

So why, when we are faced with overwhelming data demonstrating the utter futility of telling our teenagers to clean their rooms, do we still persist in creating pointless conflict by telling them to do things that we know they never will?

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by Norman Levine

 

I can handle having an e-mail ignored but its tough when your neighborhood hummingbirds reject your feeder. I was scrubbing it and replacing the sugar water when a friend remarked that all my attention to the tiny birds was counter-intuitive.

He explained that my red plastic flower look-alike was destroying the bird’s natural survival instincts. I was stopped in my tracks. One more time I did it all wrong.

As an urban creature I have long been two with Nature. I can't even recall being attached to stuffed animals. My idea of camping is to go to a motel and sleep with the windows open. I couldn't tell dog poop from bear droppings. But I digress.

The subject is counter-intuition.

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You can actually ask for a raise any time you want. No way . . . Yes way. This is one of those rules that is not in the employee handbook. Oh, there is something in there about performance reviews; when, why and how they happen. It's usually written to be ambiguous, open ended and uniform for "fairness" throughout the organization. This allows managers to have a very wide latitude in determining who, when and for what reasons a raise is given. It gives them the authority to make judgment calls. With that single thought in mind, who says a person can't ask for a raise in between those predetermined times? How about a raise right after your 3 month probation of starting a job?

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Bruce Newman is the editor-in-chief of the PI Newsletter.  Contact him at: newsletter@prodinst.com

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