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One of the first rules of personal finance is to keep track of your expenses and income. That’s how you know where the money is. And where it’s going.

Knowing isn’t enough though. Nothing changes simply because you know that 18% of your money is going toward dining out. But without knowing that…you’re powerless to do much about it.

What your KPI’s? What key numbers are important to you?

Think about driving your car. Look at the instrument cluster on your dash. Do you pay equal attention to every gauge? Nope. Because some of them are unimportant. In fact, I’ll bet you don’t even understand some of them. Those are the ones you ignore completely.

Speedometer. It matters.

Fuel gauge. It really matters.

Check engine light. Yep, that one matters, too.

There’s 3. But we’re talking about your car, not your business. Both have more nuances that first meet the eye. In spite of the complexity of our cars, they’re mostly very simple to operate. That’s where the metaphor breaks down. Our businesses can seem simple, but we know how complex they truly are.

What are the three big measurements inside your business? The ones that really let you know what’s going on?

Sales / Revenues

Most owners will mention this first, and for good reason. No sales mean no customers. No customers mean no business. It’s the oxygen we need to keep our businesses alive.

There’s a problem. Sales and revenues don’t tell us how healthy our business is. Worse yet, these numbers can fool us into thinking things are okay. Even terrific. And merely tracking sales doesn’t necessarily reveal why sales/revenues are going up, or down. We just know it is what it is. Why is still a baffling question.

Profits

Gross. Net. Track both and now we’re getting a clearer picture of the health of our business. More is better, but simply tracking the number doesn’t indicate why it’s going up, or down. Again, the why can evade us.

Expenses

Tracking where the money goes and now we’re closing in the why of it all. Why is our cash flow being pinched? Expenses can tell us.

Why aren’t we keeping more profits? Expenses provide the answer.

What’s our customer acquisition cost? Without knowing our expense (investment), we have no way to calculate it.

Data is your friend, but you have to see it clearly. And for what it is. Tracking whatever matters is just the price you pay for the opportunity to improve the number. It shines a light on the thing (whatever THE THING is) so you can focus on it.

Track it, improve it centers on measurement, analysis and asking lots of questions…most of which revolve around, “What can we do about this?” Put another way, “How can we improve this?”

Improvement after tracking is an assumption we must make as owners. Don’t assume it can’t be made better!

Feedback

There are trackable things that have no gauges. You’re back behind the wheel of your car tooling to work at 60 miles an hour. Suddenly, a small vibration begins. You can’t tell where it’s coming from, but you know something is wrong. You slow to 50 miles an hour, but the vibration worsens. No warning lights go off on your dash. Nothing would indicate there’s a problem, but your senses don’t lie. Something is clearly wrong. So you pull off to the shoulder to have a closer look where you discover one wheel is loose.

Paying attention pays off. When we’re driving a car our eyes, ears and other senses help us navigate safely. It’s why developing autonomous vehicles has been slow coming. The human brain has an ability to process all the incoming data at unparalleled speed. Things that aren’t tracked – measured technically using meters or gauges – are instantly measured by the human brain. We adjust accordingly. That’s why you pulled your car over when that vibration began and didn’t improve.

So what’s the point? Brace yourself because I’m going to throw you a curveball. Track everything. I’m not saying make everything important, but give it to somebody to track. Solicit people inside your organization who love this sort of stuff. We need people willing (and happy) to track stuff – to measure it. If necessary, solicit as many people as you need. Why track everything?

Years of operating businesses with lots of moving parts has shown me that you don’t always know what’s important. Or when.

If everything is important, nothing is important. I started saying that decades ago because I learned as a young leader that priorities are needed if we’re going to grow great. I’ve not seen anybody grow great, or grow anything great by making everything equally important. But at the same time I’ve also learned the value of tracking everything. Not to make it a priority, but to keep an eye on it. To look for trends and patterns – which is largely what we’re doing as we operate our businesses. 

Retailers and manufacturers know the importance of tracking inventory. The companies that can do it best tend to churn to the top. WalMart did. Now you’ve got to do something with that data. Just knowing it isn’t the key. WalMart stores know what items are best sellers at one store versus the other one 10 miles away. Stocking levels are adjusted based on the rate of sale. The power is in the doing, but the doing is sparked by knowing. It’s the pressure to always close that knowing-doing gap.

Can it be tracked? Track it. Give the task to somebody willing (and excited) to own it. Challenge them to make sense of it. To look for patterns and trends. Then to make suggestions on ways it can be improved.

Meet with these folks regularly. Get them in a room together regularly. Let them nerd out about it. Don’t muzzle them. Turn them loose. Challenge them to make sure they’re tracking accurately. Question everything. Then listen!

In short order you’ll figure out there are some new things you’re tracking for the first time that you can now improve – things you never thought of improving before.

Be well. Do good. Grow great!

RC

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Spring break was last week here in DFW. While I don’t have school-age kids I do have school-age grandkids. More importantly, I have clients who have school-age kids and many of them (check that, almost all of them) took last week off to get in one last vacation before the end of the school year. Quite a few made a trek to Colorado or some other snow-laden environment where skiing and snowboarding happen.

I didn’t operate at full-strength last week (sorry, that’s a hockey reference meaning all 5 skaters are on the ice). Now that we’re into a new week, and folks are back at work, I thought we’d think about the value of stepping away. Vacations. Sabbaticals. Retreats. They’re all forms of stopping the normal, usual and routine. And they’re harder for some than others.

Stepping away. Unplugging. They’re often helpful if we want to more deeply connect. To something or somebody beyond or outside our normal routines. Maybe that’s the power – connecting to something or somebody else outside our routines.

In episode 165 I talked about NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s comments on the mental and emotional health of today’s NBA player. Watch athletes today as they enter the stadiums and arenas. Headphones on. Faces in phones. Connection, which feeds our emotional stability, is increasingly challenged by the need to be plugged in and always ON. But we know this and we’ve all read plenty about how social media platforms are designed to hook us to the rush we get by knowing what’s happening at all times. Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) is a real thing.

The irony is we are missing out. We’re often missing out on deeper conversations. We’re missing out on fueling our curiosity about others. A deep enough curiosity that compels us to engage in conversation, to ask questions and to form deeper connections.

Intimacy has given way to more shallow casual connection. I know what you ate for dinner last night. I know the concert you plan to go to tonight. I see the new clothes you bought. I feed on all these details, but I don’t really know you. I just know what you want me, and the rest of the world, to know. I know how you front to all of us. And you can easily see how I front to others, too. That’s the depth of our connection. We just see the storefront without ever taking the time to walk into the store and peruse the real merchandise.

When we stop fronting with a sincere intention on more deeply connecting with others, or even with ourselves, we gain something more precious than shallow knowledge of what food we’re eating, or what clothes we’re buying or where we’re vacationing.

ENVY

a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else’s possessions, qualities, or luck

Being so plugged in feeds our envy, which in turn weakens our connections because it increases our judgment and discontentment. “Man, you went to Hawaii during Spring Break? I didn’t get to go anywhere.” So it goes.

No need to connect. No need to figure anything else out about you. I’ve got your whole story figured out.

Or do I?

Flip it around. How many people know your whole story? Come on, think about it. Answer it.

One? Two? Five? I’m betting most of us can’t name 5 people who know our whole story. People who understand the total person we really are. People who know and understand our context. But not just people who know us…people willing and able to help us.

Compassion is where it starts. That’s why it’s the first C on my list.

Compassion • Communication • Connection • Collaboration • Culture

Compassion opposes envy and judgment. Until we can establish compassion for each other we’re going to be severely limited in the depth of our communication. Without communication, we can’t truly connect. Not in a meaningful way where we can serve each other.

So today, let’s lift our eyes up beyond our phones and devices. It doesn’t mean we bemoan technology. It’s terrific. We all love it. But it can’t replace human curiosity and compassion. Or the care we need to take to nurture relationships.

Walk around your company today. Call people by name. Shake some hands. Brag on folks. It won’t seem so deep to you, but it’ll be deep to the people you serve. Keep doing it and you’ll find paths to deeper connections over time.

Be well. Do good. Grow great!

RC

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A couple of days ago there was a UFC fight in Las Vegas for the welterweight title. Tyron Woodley was the defending champion. Kamaru Usman was the opponent. The champ lost. Badly.

But it was what happened after the fight that got all the press. Tyron’s mom, Deborah, a 66-year-old who raised Tyron all by herself while working multiple jobs – as she put it, she did what she had to do – approached the new champion as he limped to his dressing room with the championship belt slung over his shoulder.

Deborah, who has a long history of showing grace to the opponents of her son (she even did it during his wrestling days in high school back in Missouri). Tonight was no different. She hollered at the victor, approached him and hugged him. He broke down crying into her shoulder, apologizing to her. You can read more and see the video here.

“It’s all good, baby. It’s all good. It’s your turn. It ain’t his turn.”

Her kindness clearly moves Usman, who won the contest and was now the current champion. Proving that even champions and winners need encouragement.

Do you have any doubt whatsoever that Deborah and her son, Tyron, are the real winners? Do you have any doubt at all that Usman, now the UFC welterweight champion is the winner? Do you have any doubt that by seeing this story YOU are a winner, benefiting from the grace shown by a 66-year-old mother?

Yeah, me neither. We’re all better for it.

Look at that. Look at the reach. The impact. The power.

Is it that winners also need encouragement or is it that in order to win we all need it? I think the later.

Who benefits more? The person giving the encouragement or the person receiving it?

Does it matter? It’s not a contest where somebody wins and somebody loses. It’s not even a matter of who wins more. It’s a matter of need, opportunity and benefit. The need for encouragement and grace is high. Always. The opportunities to extend grace, compassion and understanding – and encouragement – are equally high. There’s never a time where you’ll struggle to find it. It’s staring you in the face almost at every turn. Daily. And the benefit? Well, go dive into that story and video and then tell me what you think about the benefit. ENORMOUS.

It’s the power of people. It’s our ability to have a big impact on each other. To help each other, even when it’s not obvious that we may need the help. I mean, come on. The man has her son’s championship belt slung over one shoulder. What does he need from her? Was she driven by what she needed to extend? Was she driven because she noticed something in the man who just defeated her son? Some sadness perhaps? I don’t know.

But just like her work raising her son, she did what she had to. She did what she could.

What about you? What about me?

Are we doing what we should? Are we doing what we can? To serve each other? To support each other? To encourage each other?

I’m proud to have seen the story. I’m sad that such a story gets our attention because that depth of concern, care, compassion, grace and encouragement is too stinking rare. That’s sad.

We need to change that.

Be well. Do good. Grow great!

RC

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“I’m not sure it’s ever going to be right,” he tells me. He’s spent the last few minutes telling me about a project that is very important to him. A project he’s as passionate about as anything he’s done in a long time. I ask some questions to make sure I’m seeing and hearing things as they truly are. One of the first things I want to know is how far along he is in the project. That’s when I get a reality check.

He says, “Oh, we haven’t launched it yet.” I press a bit more asking him to describe what has been done so far. He rambles on about planning sessions, timelines established and a host of other details that I’m assuming are important, but certainly not vital to launching because…well, because they’ve not yet launched. So how important could they be? 😉

“When do you think you’ll be ready to start?” I ask. Now he’s repeating himself. “I just don’t know if we’re ever going to be able to get it squared away. Not at this rate.”

We’re about 10 minutes into the conversation. Enough already. I hit LAUNCH and thus begins my mini-sermon on taking something from start to profit (profit could be in dollars, productivity or anything else one deems valuable or important).

This movie is played out daily in every organization of any size. People stuck in planning mode. It’s like a person going target shooting and getting stuck in ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim mode. What’s the point in going target shooting if you never pull the trigger? Seems foolish, but we don’t feel foolish because we fool ourselves into thinking that planning is doing. Well, kinda sorta, but not really.

Time for a reality check.

The reality is that we learn by doing. Okay, we learn MORE by doing. We certainly learn better (more deeply) by DOING.

Let’s be practical. And real.

Soldiers preparing to go into combat learn by training, practice and lots of repetition. Ditto for pilots and anybody else who is about to engage in life and death situations. The stakes determine the level of preparation. Rightfully so.

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that whatever you’re planning to do isn’t going to put anybody’s life at risk. If so, then plan away. Get it as right as you can. Test it. Test it some more. Then launch.

For all the rest of us, we’re likely going to be way ahead of the game if we have plans that hit 70% on our confidence meter. Sometimes anything north of 50% may be sufficient. Again, the stakes determine the requirements.

Speed doesn’t mean reckless.

Launch speed matters. The faster you start, the faster you can fix. The faster you fix, the more success you experience. It’s a formula that works.

My conversation partner ultimately had to acknowledge that weeks and months of planning, planning, and planning hadn’t brought the launch date any closer. Mostly, it had been a major waste of time and effort whose aim was directed at making people feel better. More confident to start. And it hadn’t worked. Instead, it had fostered timidity. The ongoing striving to make it “just right.”

The team was stuck but didn’t know it.

We learn fastest by pulling the trigger. How else can we tell if our aim is off?

Ready, aim, fire. Yes, by all means, prepare and plan. That’s the whole ready and aim part. Give yourself the best chance to hit what you’re aiming at – the target. Keep your eyes on the target as you pull the trigger. Won’t do you any good to watch the target unless you do though – pull the trigger, that is!

Now, fix your aim. Did you hit the target on the first shot? Great! Now shoot again, and again and again. As long as you’re hitting the target, keep shooting.

If your aim is off, fix it. Adjust. Correct it. Pull the trigger again.

Rinse and repeat.

Where is the growth? Where is the real fixing happening?

After you pull the trigger. Only then.

Everything else is just hypothetical until you pull the trigger. Planning and all the other ready, aim stuff you think is so important is largely “here’s what we think will happen” or “here’s what we want to happen.” Pulling the trigger is our reality check. It’s how we find out if our theories are true or not. It’s how we figure out what adjustments to make so we can find success.

The problem is plans don’t have to fail.

We can stay in planning mode and never find out if we’re right. We can just assume we’re right and get stuck in the endless loop tape of preparing, planning and planning some more. Who cares why? Fear. Perfectionism. What difference does it make? Failure to DO SOMETHING is failure, period.

Risk versus reward. If pulling the trigger has an extraordinarily high price, then do the work to get it as right as you can. If the price is too high, you may want to figure something else out. Don’t even take the shot if you don’t want to. That’s okay, too.

But the game is made of taking shots. Pulling the trigger is where achievement and success are found. If you’re not able to pull the trigger then you have to figure out why. Why are we putting this off? What are we hoping to improve by all this preparation and planning? You’re either in it to win it, or you’re not.

Get going. Fix it as you go. It’ll accelerate learning and growth. And you’ll figure out how to win, or you’ll figure out you can’t. Either way, you’ll win.

Be well. Do good. Grow great!

RC

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Last Friday NBA Commissioner Adam Silver spoke with at the MIT Sports Analytics Conference. The topic? The mental health of the players.

Silver reported that social media and headphones are impacting the professional athletes, sometimes making them feel more anxious and isolated. Players fly or board buses with headphones affixed and interactions aren’t what they once were.

Heads down. Music in their ears. Scrolling through their social media.

During the conversation Silver recalls Isaiah Thomas telling him,

“Championships are won on the bus.”

I recently watched a 2014 documentary – The Hornet’s Nest – about a father and son who were embedded with troops in Afganistan. Like most other wartime military documentaries, it’s evident that the soldiers are fighting for each other. Band of brothers is a real thing.

Our lives are enriched by the deep connection we have with comrades, co-workers, family members and the other people in our lives. When those connections begin to slip, so do we.

The NBA Players Association is so serious about the mental health of their members they launched a mental health and wellness initiative last May. In spite of the multi-million dollar contracts, the jet-set lifestyle and the other perks that come with being a professional athlete…these people endure constant scrutiny, criticism and glorification. It’s easy to see how the noise could be overwhelming and foil the best attempts to have peace.

Last week a local radio team on the number 1 station in Dallas traveled one week with the Dallas Stars NHL team. They’ve done it for 14 seasons now. This is a team, like most, with their own team plane, built with every possible amenity to make the players comfortable. These radio hosts get to experience world-class travel just like the athletes, staying at 5-star hotels and dining at the finest restaurants. When they returned they talked about how exhausting it was to be in 4 hotels over 5 days. And they only had to focus on doing a 3-hour radio show each day. Proof once again that all that glitters ain’t necessarily gold.

We’re not operating professional sports franchises. Some of us may want to one day (not me), but we’re operating businesses and organizations that aren’t likely so high flying as the Dallas Stars. Or the Golden State Warriors. Or the Boston Red Sox. What does any of this mean for us?

Just this – isolation is destructive to happiness. And unhappiness is counterproductive to high performance.

Workplace dynamics – or the lack of them – is worth a closer look. That includes how people are set up. The open office concept is increasingly under fire for failing to do the very thing it was designed to do – help people connect and collaborate.

Perhaps people need their own space in order to more deeply connect. Not hard to understand. Look at your home. Inside our families, we all need our space, time for ourselves. Then we yearn to come together. Imagine your entire family having to occupy one big room, together all the time? Food for thought.

But the point is how deeply can we care about each other.

I focus frequently on communication, connection, collaboration, and culture. At the heart of all 4 of these important components is COMPASSION. It’s about our willingness and ability to care about one another.

It’s why I find myself constantly telling folks about Tom Rath’s 2006 book, Vital Friends.

The sub-title is, “The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without.” Truth is, the people who surround us, the people we care about and the people who care about us have a dramatic impact on our lives.

Team chemistry. Living in DFW where we have every major professional sport represented we get to hear lots of coaches and pro athletes talk. Beyond the X’s and O’s of each sport, there is a lot of talk about how well the players gel. General managers and coaches are always trying to find players who have skills to help the team, but also humans who will fit in. It’s harder than it looks, likely complicated by the things NBA Commissioner Silver pointed out.

People working elbow to elbow day after day, with headphones on, checking social media, posting narratives to depict their lives as something different than what they truly are — increasing their sense of being imposters, amplifying their need to find social acceptance on Instagram – and perhaps resulting in a deeper loneliness than they know how to manage.

You’re the leader. What do you do?

I don’t have THE answer. Today I hope to help you give it some headspace. Think about it. Look around your organization. Listen. What do you observe? What’s working in your opinion? What isn’t working?

I can tell you that short-term trendy solutions are crap, sparked largely by coaching or consulting companies selling a solution. Climbing walls, rope courses, and other adventure-based team building exercises may have their place, but I’m not a fan. Artificial setting designed to overcome day-after-day, hour-after-hour routine just seem shallow and empty to me. I wouldn’t be impressed if a leader asked me to spend a morning, an afternoon or an entire day doing such things. You may though. And that’s fine. I’m not opposed to these things. I’m just opposed to leaders or bosses thinking those are going to fix a broken culture. They won’t.

Let me slam my generation for a moment. 😉 Butts in the seat meant work was being done. That’s why too many older leaders whine about younger generation workers. And why an awful lot of them are opposed to virtual workers. If they can’t see people where they’re supposed to be stationed, then they incorrectly assume productivity is being hampered.

Truth is, time spent connecting, sharing and learning about each other may have an incalculable ROI. When employees roam around the visit with each other (sure, moderation in all things), they’re not necessarily wasting time. They’re communicating and connecting. Those must happen before collaboration. And all 3 are vital to forming your culture.

I know this. Leaders who foster the first 3 C’s build the best cultures on the planet. People are happier. They enjoy doing battle with others. Fighting along side others. That’s what time on that bus represents. Our ability to learn to care about people, know people and trust people. If you can’t foster that in your organization…you’ll never be a champion.

Be well. Do good. Grow great!

RC

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A young man aspiring to get into the big state university neglects high school homework. Weeks before graduation he gets a rejection letter. The University doesn’t grant him admission because his grades aren’t good enough. He failed to understand the consequences of not taking high school as seriously as he could have.

The epidemic of accountability is real. It’s not limited to young people. The prevailing thought that the universe owes us, or that we’re victims of somebody else’s doing – it gives us an out that we’re happy to take. It’s not our fault. It’s somebody else’s fault.

Leaders have long struggled to find ways to help educate and train people to properly understand how things work. Namely, how to help people really understand that there are rewards they can gain and consequences they can avoid. “Can” is the big word. Each person has the power to affect the outcome.

First things first. Leaders must first hire people, or train people, to understand that they have command of their choices, their actions, and their outcomes. I’m not a big fan of pushing water up a hill – meaning, I’m not fond of trying to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. Converting people, changing people – it’s really, really tough work. Maybe you want to take that on. Maybe not. That’s up to you. I’d rather find people already bent toward accepting responsibility for their outcome. For me, time spent helping them achieve growth is very rewarding. Trying to get people to move from excuse making to accepting responsibility would drive me crazy, so I choose to not do that kind of work.

Grow Great is about just that – improvement, growth, and change. 

Helping people is job one for any leader. Today, I hope to provoke you to think more deeply and thoughtfully about how you can serve your people to gain a better grasp on how they can control their own destiny. By more soberly considering the impact of their decisions and behaviors, people can have a big impact on their own growth. It’s big service leaders owe their people.

But how?

Candor.

That’s it. Candid conversations where you don’t protect people from the truth, but where you insist on sharing the truth.

Let them get punched in the face.

You want to protect the people you lead. And you should. The bigger question is, “From what?”

Protect them from things that could cause harm. Get really clear on what defines harm though. Pain isn’t always harmful. Suffering either. Or struggle. You have to let people fail and suffer some.

A retailer had a staff of buyers. They were tasked with making merchandising decisions for the company. It’s a big role that can make or break any retailer.

One buyer invests $100,000 in a single product that he thinks will be a wild success in the fall. Instead, it’s a flop. The product had a target retail price that was supposed to garner a 40% profit margin. That means the $100K investment should have been successfully sold for over $166K, providing the company with a $66K profit.

That didn’t happen. Instead, months later the product was stagnant and growing less valuable every day. The markdowns began. The company decided to forego making any profits. They just wanted to get back as much of their original investment of $100K as possible. Within weeks they had only sold a fraction of the inventory, less than $10K worth.

Now things were getting really bad. The product was clearly going to produce a loss for the company. They marked it down some more. And some more. And some more. When the smoke cleared the company’s $100K investment cost the company $70K. Seventy thousand dollars was flushed down the tubes. A single deal that was the worst mistake the buyer had made in his 4-year career with the company.

Upstairs there was talk of firing the buyer. In a meeting with HR and top brass, the merchandise manager, the direct supervisor of the buyer, put forth a compelling case. “If you think I’m going to let our $70,000 investment in him walk out the door to benefit somebody else, you’re nuts. It was an education that he’ll NEVER forget.”

He knew the buyer was a responsible person who owned his work. In fact, just 40 days after the merchandise hit the warehouse (it had been in stores about 32 days), the buyer had come to his boss saying he felt, based on the sale through (the speed of sales), he had a bad feeling they should make markdowns much quicker than normal to minimize the loss. The boss, being the leader he was, owned the decision with his bosses. He told the buyer to stay the course for a few more weeks. Based on what they now knew, the merchandise manager knew the buyer was right. Had they marked the inventory down more quickly they could have likely reduced the loss from $70K to something much, much lower.

The VP of Merchandising was the man in charge, answerable to the CEO. She realized she had two good people here. Her merchandise manager and buyer were both capable, high performing employees who quickly took ownership. A $70K mistake provided a priceless education for both people. It was painful, but not fatal. She leveraged it to help everybody. Instead of some HR-based PIP (performance improvement plan; a fancy term for “we’re going to work you out of your role”) she had a conversation – a real dialogue – with her two employees where they walked through the purchase, the thoughts behind it, and the execution of it once it arrived. She wanted to learn from it, too. Happy to get her own hands dirty she led the way for her employees to know she had a vested interest in their careers.

Contrast that with another retailer who experienced a similar situation, but handled it very differently. Admittedly, it was a bit more money on the line – almost double, $180,000 invested at wholesale. But the overall loss was actually less, $60K. The COO, thinking he was going to make a point, forced the VP of Merchandising to formally reprimand the merchandise manager, who was forced to terminate the buyer. In his mind, that was leadership that would teach “these people to be accountable.”

Care to figure out which culture is the higher performing of the two?

Yesterday we talked about forgiveness and compassion. That doesn’t mean people “get by” with poor decision making or poor performance. But that didn’t happen in either of these cases. In the subjective world of buying products for retail, some purchases work out better than others. Both buyers were diligent in how they approached their respective purchases. In fact, both had pretty solid intel to back up their decisions. Each company had a precedent of similar products with good sales through success. For a variety of reasons, neither purchase worked out this time.

The first company used the loss to make it a people gain. The second company lost money, experience and one good employee. Within 90 days the merchandise manager left his employee to accept the same role with a better company, a competitor. So it’s really difficult to quantify the real loss suffered by the second company.

Just one word and thought for you as a leader – HELP. That didn’t happen with the second company. Nobody helped anybody, except themselves – they only helped make themselves feel better by pandering to their own ego.

Be a leader. Be helpful. Grow your people by first growing yourself.

Be well. Do good. Grow great!

RC