Last week, 5-time NBA All-Star, Kevin Love, signed a contract to return to the Cleveland Cavaliers. His new deal will pay him $120M over 4 years, approximately $30M per year. These days, it’s not uncommon to see professional athletes sign enormous contracts punctuated with a staggering number of zeros. What is uncommon about this particular story…
When I hear the word family, beyond the mental images of my own, I can’t help but think of the Cleavers, the Bradys, the Cunninghams, and the Huxtables. Growing up, I probably spent as much time hanging out with those families as I did my own. Television families of the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s…
On the days Josh Drean is not in class listening to a lecture in his graduate program at Harvard, he’s in a school gymnasium giving one to hundreds of teenagers. Only to his youthful audience, it doesn’t sound like a lecture. That’s because Josh is a hip, cool, relevant youth speaker who breakdances and beatboxes as he…
When the Grinch stole Christmas from all the Whos down in Whoville, he went about it with passion and fury. The scrawny-limbed hermit with a nasty attitude and a foul grimace felt like an outsider who was unappreciated by his peers, so he decided to turn the tables and ruin Christmas for the entire village.…
Walking through Denver International Airport on my way to Nashville last week, it wasn’t difficult to pick out the Southwest gates from those of all the other airlines. They were the only ones that looked like …well, like it’s late October. That’s because Southwest Airlines takes fun very seriously. They know if they promote a…
For a high school teacher, the most frustrating night of each semester is the one set aside for parent-teacher conferences. Although parent’s night for 1st and 2nd grade students always draws a full house, the parent-teacher conferences at the neighboring high school are sparsely attended, generally attracting only those parents of the highest achieving students. Those…
Growing up, I saw a lot of ads on TV and in magazines for products that were compared to Brand X. Of course, there was no such thing as Brand X, so advertisers had the freedom to disparage it as if it were the competitor’s product, and then point out how theirs was clearly superior. Mature adults…
Hank McGuinty is the owner of an HVAC service and installation business in Beeville, Texas (pop. 13,500). His uncanny ability to attract and hire technicians is the envy of all the other owners in this large national chain, and it’s helping him crush his competition. With the ever-diminishing number of skilled workers in every trade – especially in smaller rural communities…
Not long ago I worked with a mid-sized manufacturing plant in St. Louis that had a remarkable record of attracting and keeping in-demand workers. Although the company offered competitive wages, their formula for employee retention did not include offering above-market compensation, perks, and benefits. When I asked Darrel, the plant manager, his secret for hanging on to his skilled machinists…
My new high-end coffee brewer drives me absolutely insane. It brews the absolute perfect cup of java – hot nectar of the gods – about every third day. The other two result in either an average tasting cup of convenience store coffee or an evil black muck that you wouldn’t throw down your kitchen drain for…