When I go to a restaurant I always ask the manager, "Give me a table near a waiter. "
The idea of let's all share the pain equally, or let's freeze salaries altogether - it's ass-backwards. It's absolutely ass-backwards.
We bring together the best ideas - turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies.
If you reward candor, you'll get it.
Celebrating creates an atmosphere of recognition and positive energy. Imagine a team winning the World Series without champagne spraying everywhere. And yet companies win all the time and let it go without so much as a high five. Work is too much a part of life not to recognize moments of achievement. Make a big deal out of them. If you don't, no one will.
In every company, differentiation is never more important than it is in times of trouble, and that's the time when everyone tends to go to the well and equalize rather than differentiate.
One of the jobs of a manager is to instill confidence, pump confidence into your people. And when you've got somebody who's raring to go and you can smell it and feel it, give 'em that shot.
In the last workshop I taught, a woman flew in from Thailand. She's a medical doctor in Bangkok. I asked her in her one-on-one session where she wanted photography to be in her life. Did she want a second career? Was it about earning money? Or was it art? And she said "None of those. I want photography to be serious in my life. " It would be like someone wanting music, like piano playing, to be a richer, deeper, and maybe even harder experience.
It's hard to deny talent. If you're good, you're good.
The moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside; the boding cry of the tree-toad, that harbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screechowl.
To assume a cat's asleep is a grave mistake. He can close his eyes and keep both his ears awake.