“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, or worn. It is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace & gratitude.” – Denis Waitley
My Friend: Eula M. Guest
October 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Chess of Checkers
What tools are you applying and how will you implement or plan to realize those new strategies in 2014?
What part of the set are you on the chessboard? Are you the King or Queen? Can your business run without you? Or does it come to a complete stop if you are not able to run it? What strategies have you put in place to have your business continue when you are not available? Are you the Rook? Are you safeguarding the business without making the important decisions? You have a small percentage not the controlling percentage of your business; you’re there to lend support and to keep the business running when the King and Queen are not available. The bishops are limited in what roles they play in the business. They may be more of a managerial role but have to go to the King and Queen for approval before moving ahead. The knight is limited and boxed into what moves are made.
Unlike the bishop, they just can’t move in business. They may be the lower executive. They have a supervisor that they answer to before making any moves. Last but not least, the Pawn. You are the one who comes up with all the brilliant ideas, concepts, and marketing strategies but don’t have any real defining role in ownership in the company. You love the business and love helping but are not being acknowledged for your contribution to the business. What piece are you and have you taken the time to define what roles you place in your business?
You are not playing chess at all; you are playing checkers. No real strategy at all, no definition of who plays what role in the business. You have partners and investors but two people are playing on a board. One of you is the Queen and making most of the decisions. Going into 2014 how are you going to define the roles of the partners? Will you continue to play chess or checkers in the strategy of running your business?
Techniques you can use now for 2014
- Have a partners meeting in a relaxed atmosphere where you all can discuss your roles. Have you all defined your roles in the last 12 months? Are you all happy with your roles?
- This is the time to find out if people want to do more or do less in the running of the company. Never assume people are completely happy with their roles.
- This is the time of year when you may want to make more defined distinctive roles in the company depending on the industry. If this is not a good time for partners to have this discussion, then you all need to agree to have a meeting after the holidays if this is the busy time of year for your industry and your business.
- Have a meeting agenda, and all the partners should have an equal say on the points to discuss at this meeting. Remember it should be in a relaxed space and no one should schedule any appointments for after that meeting to give time to iron things out without feeling rushed.
- Turn off all devices. No one should be reading text, answering e-mails, or taking telephone calls. This should be a frank, open meeting. No interruptions, and have some food and wine to break the ice when covering some important points.
- The strategy should be to make the business better and to not point fingers and playing the blame game. Leave all those issue out the door. Keep in mind that you all started the business for a reason, so keep that in mind while having this meeting.
Women’s News: Women Are Better Multitaskers Than Men, Study Finds
October 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment
By: By Elizabeth Palermo, LiveScience Contributor
Published: 10/28/2013 02:48 PM EDT on LiveScience
Anecdotal evidence has long supported the hypothesis that the fair sex is also the “do-a-bunch-of-things-at-the-same-time” sex. And now a study out of the U.K. helps to support the idea women are better at multitasking than men.
In a set of two experiments, psychologists at the University of Hertfordshire, the University of Glasgow and the University of Leeds pitted men against women to see if they could lend some scientific credibility to that commonly held belief that women are better than men at multitasking.
the first experiment, 120 men and 120 women played a computer game in which they were asked to carry out two tasks independently of one another. Both sexes performed these individual tasks with the same speed and accuracy. But when participants were asked to perform the two tasks at the same time, women were quicker; their responses were only slowed by about 61 percent compared with the first task, while men’s were slowed by about 77 percent.
According to researchers, the results of this experiment suggest women are more adept than men when it comes to switching quickly between different tasks. Women also fared better in the second experiment, in which both sexes were put to the test performing a set of common, real-life tasks — like sketching out a plan for finding a lost set of keys, locating different restaurants on a city map and solving simple arithmetic problems. Participants (47 men and 47 women) were given a certain amount of time to perform these various tasks simultaneously. To complicate matters even further, participants also had to contend with a ringing telephone that, if answered, prompted them for answers to general knowledge questions.
Women were found to be better at some types of “real world” multitasking, as well.
“Men and women did not differ significantly at solving simple arithmetic problems, searching for restaurants on a map, or answering general knowledge questions on the phone, but women were significantly better at devising strategies for locating a lost key,” the researchers write online in the journal BMC Psychology.
Perhaps most significantly, women scored much higher than men on the key search task, leading researchers to suspect women might possess a higher level of cognitive control than men — particularly when it comes to planning, monitoring and inhibiting behavior.
The researchers caution against making generalizations based on this study because there is very little experimental evidence of multitasking differences between men and women. “Instead, we hope that other researchers will aim to replicate and elaborate on our findings,” they write.
Even so, humans overall may not be natural-born multitaskers, as research has suggested dividing attention across several tasks can tax the brain. Dividing attention across multiple activities is taxing on the brain, and can often come at the expense of real productivity, said Arthur Markman, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
“There’s a small number of people who are decent multitaskers — this concept of a ‘supertasker’ — but at best, it’s maybe 10 percent of the population, so chances are, you’re not one of them,” Markman told LiveScience in June. “The research out there will tell you that there are a couple of people who are good at it, but it’s probably not you.”
Follow Elizabeth Palermo on Twitter @techEpalermo, Facebookor Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.
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