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by Dan Oswald With the recent tragic death of comedian and actor Robin Williams, my family and I decided to watch one of his many great films over the weekend, Dead Poets Society. The movie is about a group of boys at a private prep school. It’s there that they meet Professor Keating, their new […]
Dear Readers, The article’s authors—Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor of organizational behavior, and Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology—had conducted a study about motivation. According to them, there are two types of motivation: internal and instrumental. Internal motivation, as you would guess, comes from within. People are motivated to do something based on the feeling of […]
by Dan Oswald Let me see if something strikes a chord with you as it did with me. As a manager, you’re asked to be a wise steward of the resources given to you. That means not only generating an appropriate amount of revenue and profit with the resources you manage today but also investing […]
by Dan Oswald We live in a world where everything moves fast and is interconnected. There was a time when 20 miles may have represented an entire day’s journey. Now we can travel that distance in less than 20 minutes. And information moves even faster. We learn about things that are occurring halfway around the […]
In today’s Advisor, business and leadership blogger Dan Oswald offers his thoughts on qualities of great leaders. (Oswald, CEO of BLR® offers these thoughts weekly in The Oswald Letter.) Marvin Bower joined McKinsey & Company in 1933 and served as the management consulting firm’s managing partner from 1950 to 1967. In 1997, he published a […]
Please participate in our brief survey and see how what you are doing for training stacks up against what other successful companies are doing. We’ll get answers to these questions and more: How often do your employees receive training? What kind of training is conducted? What specific topics is training offered on? What are the […]
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve undoubtedly heard about what is now being called “Bridgegate.” (I, for one, am tired of “gate” getting added to every controversy and scandal, but I’ll leave that rant for another day.) ‘Time for Traffic Problems’ It seems that one of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s top […]
Depending on the context, that single sentence—He acts like he owns the place!—can either spell disaster or be one of the most positive and flattering things to be said about an employee, says business and leadership blogger Dan Oswald. Oswald, CEO of BLR®, offered these thoughts on increasing company performance by instilling a sense of […]
While he was in Birmingham, Alabama, visiting his daughter at college, business and leadership blogger Dan Oswald saw a local newspaper with the headline “Live Generously: How three Gardendale teenagers hope to change lives with new business.” Oswald, CEO of BLR, shared his thoughts about the article in a recent edition of The Oswald Letter: […]