• UNTIL RECENT YEARS, “EMPLOYEES HAD A JOB, NOT A VOICE.”  Increasingly, as resignations in many sectors are at an all-time high (with 3% of America’s workforce quitting their jobs in September alone), companies now need to be intentional about both Culture – everything from the point of the office to how staff communicate with each other – and about Retention policies. Surveys confirm principal reasons they resign as: (1) Work/ Life Balance now plausible for white-collar employees through Remote Work opportunities; (2) Shift-scheduling priorities for blue-collar and especially single parent workers; (3) Health Care coverage concerns, especially among high-school educated workers. “Forward-thinking firms now conduct ‘stay interviews’ to find out what keeps employees, versus ‘exit’ interviews after the fact.” DCG can help design efficient & effective process.  [ECONOMIST – 11/27/21]
  • LEADERSHIP IN BUSINESS AND PERSONAL LIVES is unequivocally dependent on ability to communicate with ‘difficult’ people. A few of the most effective strategies to consider are: (1) When a person is resisting without willingness to listen, try re-orienting the issue “from their defensive & closed position or selfish excuse-making stance into an open & thinking attitude,” with response like – What if we could XYZ? or What would make XYZ possible or acceptable? ;  (2) When a person is blaming & attacking, shift him/her into an empathetic perspective, with more willingness to resolve as a win: win solution, using responses like – What do you think [the other party] might say or feel about XYZ? ;  (3) When a person is irrational and repetitive, unable to stop dwelling on the past, try focusing them toward future impacts, with responses like – I’m going ahead with XYZ but will discuss for your thoughts before then moving further. “Getting through to anybody” is a critical in management.  [HC LEADERSHIP ESSENTIALS – 11/18/21]
  • THE MOST FRACTURED SECTOR IN AMERICA NOW MAY BE HIGHER EDUCATIONS. Latest surveys from multiple schools show that: up to 70% of undergrads favor ‘reporting’ something a professor says which they find ‘offensive’; nearly a quarter of graduate students in social science or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a “wrong opinion about hot button issues such as immigration or gender differences; and 80% of PhD students now willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars … There is a gaping chasm between the promise and the reality of higher education.”  [LBN EXAMINER – 11/28/21]
  • NEXT MOST FRACTURED MAY BE THE PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICTS, like LAUSD (2nd largest in the nation) where grievance politics is an unequivocal goal.  Beyond its website describing the need to teach students about “power, privilege, oppression, and resistance, an ‘Advisory Lesson’ video presents ‘the True Meaning of Thanksgiving’ as a violent conflict between Native peoples and Pilgrims, falsely claiming it was exclusively carried out by European settlers… and implying that three Native tribes – not the state of California or USA – continue to have a legitimate claim to the lands.” Rather, they present an alternate holiday labeled ‘National Day of Mourning’ with subtitle ‘Theft of Native American Lands’… rejecting historical nuance as highly politically expedient and leveraged by LAUSD to needlessly push division and erode a quintessential American Holiday.”  [FEDERALIST – 11/26/21]
  • THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:

     According to UNICEF, “the dire economic situation now in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, with six in ten people unlikely to have sufficient food through coming winter, is prompting families to offer newborn daughters as young as 20-days old for future marriage, in return for a dowry.”

      Perhaps half our country has now literally lost faith in the foundations of modern American society:  public safety agencies/ political leadership/ media distribution of factual information/ administration of the criminal justice system/ intelligence & investigatory agencies/ military leadership/ free & open election process/ and (most important) freedom of thought & expression.  This absurd reality is most attributable to the “whole-of-government Equity Agenda” (our President’s first Executive Order), which in substance prioritizes new policies and  implementation of laws & regulations for the specific purpose, and only to the extent, of promoting ‘societal leveling’ – i.e. that all people living in America (legally or not, law-abiding or not) end up ‘equitably’ in the same place – by manner of “race-based social engineering that justifies new injustices in the name of elimination old ones.”