Will your company survive and even thrive in the Post-COVID-19 economy? Think again, the data is not in your favor.

In a 2010 article in Harvard Business Review titled “Roaring Out of Recession” authors Ranjay Gulati, Nitin Nohria, and Franz Wohlgezogen provide insight into how companies faired 3 years post-recession for the past three recessionary periods (1980 crisis, 1990 slowdown, and 2000). After researching 4,700 companies, the data showed that 17% of companies didn’t survive, resulting in bankruptcy, being acquired or forced to go private. In fact, 3 years post-recession, 80% did not regain their prerecession growth rates for sales and profits, while only 9% flourished!

What was the difference between those that flourished and those that didn’t? The companies that flourished were found to effectively balance between cost-cutting and investing to grow after the recession, but it isn’t that simple.

It comes down to the psychology of the...

October 24th, 2012, exactly 7 days after my third son was born, at a routine follow-up visit, Dr. Silverman told me “don’t break him, he’s perfect.” What are you thinking, my wife and I have two boys, 8 and 9, and I haven’t broken them yet?  Does she think I’m incapable of taking care of a newborn for a few hours? What does that mean?

Here we are seven years later and I am finally making sense of her advice.  I’ve taken a big step, I now see it as advice and not criticism, chalk one up for “making sense of experience” one of the steps in my own leadership development program.  Let me explain. 

After coaching and working with kids through the Emerge Coaching program where we focus on strengths, finding out what is right with people and doing more of it, leadership development and a peak performance mindset, I realized that “don’t break him” didn’t refer to me dropping my newborn or...

On this International Women’s Day, I want to share a story about a “trigger moment” in 2013 that made me realize how difficult it could be for women to succeed in male-dominated workplaces and industry.   

At the time, I was working in a very male-dominated industry, but that was changing.  Ironically, I was working for a female and I was very happy to have a small, but effective, team of women on our sales team that I had built the previous 3 or 4 years.  If you saw my previous post, where I consciously built our sales team utilizing a strengths-based approach, focusing on one’s talents, not on their race, sexual orientation, nationality, religion… We were very successful and the women on our team brought a much-needed level of experience and point of view that set us apart in the marketplace and in our management team. 

 In 2013, I had transitioned away from the sales role and into a newly created high-level retail...

Achieving Peak Performance Through Effective Goal Setting

Research shows that goals that are written are 80% more likely to be accomplished. Before we can set effective goals that are meaningful and motivating, we need to be in the proper mindset. 

A peak performance mindset begins with changing your limiting beliefs into liberating beliefs. Research shows that 80% of our success comes from our mindset and 20% from our skills. Given that statistic, it is imperative that we understand some of the hurdles that stand in our way of that success.  The National Science Foundation has found that we have 60,000 thoughts each day, with 48,000 of them being negative. So, the negative mindset is paralyzing our ability to reach our goals day in and day out. 

The question is, how do we overcome these negative thoughts to break through and reach our goals?   Author, Shawn Achor, outlines in his book, Before Happiness, that people with a happy mindset are 23% more...