• PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL, ESPECIALLY OF MILLENNIALS, OFTEN HAS ADVERSE RESULTS, with employees feeling “less inspired and motivated after the appraisal episodes.” Surveys find the principal reason for this to be the traditional focus on activity – i.e. what the person does – rather than on the outcome results they achieve. Typical annual ‘Evaluation’ programs measure whether an employee conforms to policies, procedures, personalities and their job description rather than results of their ‘performance’ in the context of achieving company objectives. Big companies are increasingly recognizing this misdirection and modifying traditional procedures; Adobe, for example, scrapped their program after determining that assessing employees usurped some 80,000 work-hours a year (equivalent to 40 full-time staff). DCG can help your business optimize the motivation aspects of an Evaluation process, along with effective correlation to incentivized & realistic compensation. [HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW – Feb 2, 16]

• HAS THE MEDIA BECOME THIS GENERATION’S NEMESIS? Irrelevant ‘Breaking News’ or ‘News Alerts’ overwhelm and bury many critically relevant issues of our time, and Media organizations want us to believe that their take on the ‘news’ offers us competitive advantage of some sort. But how many of the stories or polls we read, watch or listen to really impact better perspective – much less decision-making — in life, career or business? Reality is that constant interruption from news ‘flashes’ add up weekly to hours of distraction and wasted-time. Worse for many, flashy dramatic ‘news’ is actually toxic, because of misfocused or misleading perspective from: (1) over-rating importance of personalities in sports, accidents or violence versus focus on the underlying causes which might, in some way, impact one’s personal direction or behavior; (2) exacerbating ‘confirmation bias’ through stories that don’t necessarily correspond to reality – simple and stupid explanations of world events which result in overconfidence and/or misjudgment; (3) inhibiting thinking and stifling creativity by usurping concentration which disrupts comprehension, learning and imagination; and (4) promoting helplessness & pessimism since news stories are overwhelmingly about things we cannot influence.

• CORRUPTION INDEX: Annually, Transparency International ranks 168 countries on their scale of ‘corruption.’ Last year, the United States at 16th position did better than 152 others, but ranked behind the Scandinavians, Canada & British Crown countries, Switzerland & Singapore. Israel came in 32nd, China 83rd, Mexico 95th, and Russia 120th, with the most corrupt countries (surprise!) all being middle east Islamist, outpaced only by North Korea at the bottom. [CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX -2015]

• WEBSITES TO HELP CONTROL MAILBOX SPAM: (1) justdelete.me links directly to the cancellation pages of most social media sites, retailers, and others who have data on you; (2) maildrop.cc lets you create an email address which disappears 24 hours later – good for one-time deal signups or downloads; (3) https://privnote.com lets you send email without creating a data trail – the recipient is sent a URL to read your message, which then vanishes.

• THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK: Global warming has contributed to South America’s worst plague of locusts in six decades. Last year’s swarm clouds were up to four miles long and two miles high, housing some 80 million locusts per square mile – each of which can eat its body weight in crops every day. The current Argentina swarm so far covers an area the size of Delaware.

A legitimate future basketball champ! You’ve never seen a kid do this before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGjFSHW-77I

Financial times for the wealthy-enough were mostly pretty great, until the global economy badly crashed in 2008.
Most had become accustomed, at simple beck and call, to Objects of Desire with more than enough for all.
Ensconced in Material Comfort and pursuit of constant Pleasure, aggressively amassing a lifetime’s worth of Treasure –
The toys, tools & opportunity to then control their life – oblivious to reality of the world transforming to strife.
They were lucky to have ‘lived the life’ in those several decades past, certainly experiencing ‘A Good Run’ – what a shame it couldn’t last.
But greed and avarice won out; ‘haves’ didn’t have enough, and allowed their Houses of Cards to topple rather than share their stuff.
So now it’s topsy-turvy, with fortunes upside down, the Future mortgaged for trillions (when most greedsters won’t be around),
With ‘Recovery’ still illusory, from this crisis which they caused. A shame the Good Times couldn’t last; a shame so much was lost!

DCG: UTILIZING GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE FOR OPTIMAL STRATEGIC & FINANCIAL DIRECTION, MANAGEMENT, NEGOTIATION & MEDIATION