You’ve got a stack of customer invoices to create and bills to pay, all sitting patiently on your desk waiting for your attention. You dread this time of the month because numbers are just not your thing. You hate how long it takes to get the paperwork taken care of, and you don’t understand the results your bookkeeper gives you. It just looks like a list of numbers on a page that has no relation to the activities you’ve completed during the month. And then you hear in the news that a bookkeeper is going to jail for embezzling funds from a small business, a government agency or non-profit organization. Great. Just Great. Just recently, a former bookkeeper for Arizona →
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Have you noticed that ethics is in the news everywhere these days? This sometimes hugely unpopular and negatively perceived word is now the latest buzz word. Huh. I guess I was 10 years ahead of my time when I invented e-Factor!®, originally conceived as the “ethics factor”. I woke up with the idea in the wee hours of the morning after leaving the corporate world and an organization where actions and ethical values plainly did not match. As I developed the game and built my business I heard countless experts tell me to “lose the word ethics” because it wouldn’t sell – nobody wanted to be lectured about ethics and ethical conduct. In the early days at networking events I →
Happy Memorial Day. To those of you who have served or are currently serving in the military and the national guard, Thank you for your service in protecting freedom everywhere. Without you our world would be a very different place. To those of you who are remembering a loved one on this holiday weekend, I have no appropriate words. I only have the ability to recognize that you have made tremendous sacrifices I am unable to imagine, just so that all of us can live the way we do, say the things we want to say, do the things we want to do. I teach ethics, mostly to licensed professionals who are only in my class because it is mandated →
I just wrote my 7th email requesting a prospective client to let me know the status of my proposal for coaching. Last week a colleague cancelled a meeting at the last minute for the 3rd time; I told her admin not to bother rescheduling. And I’ve been tracking people down who said they wanted to meet with me and then never responded to my meeting invitation. What makes scheduling and following-up (or following through) so difficult for people? Could somebody help me understand this please, because I apparently missed the class on effective scheduling for entrepreneurs. To me, the way we manage our schedules and follow-up with people is a window into our character. Maybe I am fanatical about this →
Paris, attacked again. Bill O’Reilly leaving Fox under allegations of sexual harassment and $13M in payouts. United passenger dragged off an airplane. Where has all the good news gone?? If we can create “fake news”, why can’t we also create “good news”?
Out of the mouths of babes sometimes come very wise statements. I think we should listen more to these golden nuggets when they occur. We adults just might learn something of value. One such pearl of wisdom came from a young girl scout. Her story was on the CBS evening segment “On the Road” by Steve Hartman which aired here in Phoenix on February 17, 2017. 11-year-old Charlotte McCourt wrote a letter to a customer stating that “the Girl Scout Organization can sometimes use false advertising.” Uh-oh, our adult minds might be screaming – she’s making the organization look bad!!! “Not good”, to coin a phrase….! She was not intentionally trying to harm the Girl Scouts. Instead, she →
In starting my research for this blog post I found a USA Today headline reading “Trump delivers the death blow to ethics.” Well That’s an Understatement! Presidential advisers pitching products, releasing fake news, accepting positions for which they have no qualifications or experience, fighting with federal judges, name calling, dismantling laws without considering consequences, brushing off conflicts of interest as irrelevant… Have I missed any???! If this isn’t the death of ethics I don’t know what is.
“If money is big enough, why not?” was the response to a 60-minutes investigator who asked Stefano Varjas, an inventor from Budapest, Hungary, about whether he would sell his invention, a motorized bicycle accessory, to clients who intended to cheat in bike races. (Click here for the segment entitled “Enhancing the Bike” aired 1/29/17.) The investigator was specifically talking about racers of the Tour de France. And while Varjas would not say if he directly sold the motor to athletes directly, he said cannot say what his clients do with his motor. He also said he knew racers had used it and he participated in investigations of athletes in both the Tour de France and the Olympics. According to →
As we usher in a new leader, I am compelled to write this article. It is just bubbling out of me, because I have been witness to a change in our environment where ethics and accountability are taking a back seat to fear and anger and hate. How did this happen, and how do we release the pressure building up? I have visions of the future, and they sometimes include people curled up in little balls, afraid to speak up for fear of being attacked. In other visions, the future is positive – a change of the guard and a new way of doing things is good. The thing is, I am puzzled by the lack of accountability people are →
Do you accept credit cards? If so, pay attention! Here’s what happened on Square when an old client fraudulently disputed an old payment!