A VETERAN OWNED SMALL BUSINESS | Call or text now for a FREE consultation: +1 (770) 765-3692 | Website Login
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow, learn as if you were to live forever.”
Mohandas Gandhi (1869 – 1948)
Political and ideological leader of India during the Indian independence movement. Pioneered satyagraha – resistance to tyranny through mass civil resistance
There are millions of companies in the world.
Most fail far short of the owners’ ambitions. You would think they fail or frustrate for millions of reasons.
But there are really only four.
How can that be? Only four? Yes and I will explain.
Let me start with the first:
Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:
Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!
Mark Stevens is the author of Your Company Sucks: It’s Time to Declare War on Yourself (BenBella Books, August 2011) and CEO of MSCO, a results-driven management and marketing firm, and a popular media commentator on business matters, including marketing, branding, management and sales. To read Mark Stevens’ full biography, click here.
The term ‘professional’ comes from the Latin word ‘professio,’ which literally means to take an oath or a vow. Those who took the oath may have been entering a religious order or pledging allegiance to a political organization, but in every case, they promised to abide by a certain code of conduct and to build affective regard for the group to which they now belonged. Over the last few centuries, the term professional has come to mean different things to different people, but that central idea has not changed. What has changed is the rate of explosive growth in the number of new professions that now exists and the extent to which people in these professions must interact across borders.
Fifty years ago, we did not have television news anchors, software engineers, web designers, or cosmetic surgeons. Nor did we have tutors to help our children do their homework without ever meeting them face to face. Today, tutors sitting in India help American children do their math homework and Japanese children to get better in English composition. The combined impact of this huge shift has obviously created great benefits, but it also comes with consequences. For in an interconnected world where one person’s decision can affect those thousands of miles away, any professional failure can create a hugely undesirable impact: A rogue trader on Wall Street can bring down a large corporation in Europe; an over zealous news reporter can create security risks while reporting from behind enemy lines; a CEO of a global conglomerate can cost millions of people their jobs by embezzling company funds.
Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:
Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!
About the Author
Subroto Bagchi co-founded IT services company, MindTree and is the author of the international best-seller The Professional
. Subroto spends one-on-one time with the Top-100 leaders at MindTree on their ‘personal-professional’ issues to expand leadership capacity and build readiness for taking MindTree into the billion-dollar league. In addition, Subroto works at the grassroots by making himself available to its 45 Communities of Practice that foster organizational learning, innovation and volunteerism within the organization. To read Subroto’s complete biography, click here.
Human error reduction not only applies to the performance of operational activities but to analytical tasks as well. Errors made during performance of these tasks frequently go unnoticed at the time of occurrence, only to become consequentially evident when action is taken based on the errant analysis. These latent errors can have an equally devastating financial, environmental, asset and human impact as operational performance errors; simply occurring with greater time separation between the error and the event. Therefore, human error reduction must be applied to these activities too.
Hi there! Gain access to this article with a StrategyDriven Insights Library – Total Access subscription or buy access to the article itself.
| Subscribe to the StrategyDriven Insights Library
Sign-up now for your StrategyDriven Insights Library – Total Access subscription for as low as $15 / month (paid annually). Not sure? Click here to learn more. |
Buy the Article
Don’t need a subscription? Buy access to Human Performance Management Best Practice 3 – Qualify, Verify, and Validate for just $2! |
Excerpt from The Happiness Advantage…
I applied to Harvard on a dare. I was raised in Waco, Texas, and never really expected to leave. Even as I was applying to Harvard, I was setting down roots and training to be a local volunteer firefighter. For me, Harvard was a place from the movies, the place mothers joke about their kids going to when they grow up. The chances of actually getting in were infinitesimally small. I told myself I’d be happy just to tell my kids someday, offhandedly at dinner, that I had even applied to Harvard. (I imagined my imaginary children being quite impressed.)
Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:
Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!
About the Author
Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work
, spent over a decade at Harvard University where he won numerous distinguished teaching awards for his work. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and earned a Masters from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics. In 2006, he was Head Teaching Fellow for ‘Positive Psychology,’ the most popular course at Harvard at the time. In 2007, Shawn founded Good Think Inc. to share his research with a wider population. When the global economy collapsed in 2008, Shawn was immediately called in as an expert by the world’s largest banks to help restart forward progress. Subsequently, Shawn has spoken in 45 countries to a wide variety of audiences: bankers on Wall Street, students in Dubai, CEOs in Zimbabwe. Shawn’s research on happiness and human potential have received attention from the Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Forbes, CNN, and NPR. To read Shawn Anchor’s full biography, click here.
Business Programs