Category: Productivity

Why leaders are blind to the most important productivity opportunity of all

Email is the leading cause of preventable productivity loss in organizations today. Forbes Magazine (2008) Employees spend 1 to 3 or more hours per day managing email at 40-60% of capacity.  That means they typically lose 30-60 minutes PER DAY.   Not some.  All — even the ones who believe they are extremely productive. That means…

Most salespeople completely blow their first newbiz meeting – including you

You land a meeting with a prospect that you’ve been researching for quite some time.  Then you make the same mistake that most sales people make:  you book an hour-long meeting at her office. What’s wrong with that?  Plenty.  The chances of converting that meeting into a sale are quite slim at this point.  So…

8 strategy questions every CEO should ask

With 300+ likes and 1K shares, the strategy article 8 things every leader should know about strategy somehow struck a nerve. But as many readers pointed out correctly, it’s one thing to know what strategy is all about, but it’s another to get out there and come up with one. As you will probably agree, there is…

Guest blog: Training vs. Learning: do you want to train? Or have someone learn?

Training successfully educates only those who are predisposed to the new material. Others may endeavor to learn during class but may not permanently adopt it. The problem isn’t the value of information or the eagerness of the learner: It’s a problem with both the training model itself and the way learners learn. It’s a systems/change…

How my small company cut in half our $3.2 million dollar inbox expense in just 12 minutes!

  OK, I have a small company of only 200 employees, so $3.2 million is nothing. But imagine a company of 2,000 employees that spend 2 hrs. per day on email with an average annual salary of $70,000. That would mean that they spend OVER HALF A MILLION DOLLARS PER DAY managing email. Since we…

To 5S or not to 5S

I recently took part in a discussion that debated whether 5S is the best way to introduce Lean to an organization.  While this is a common approach because of the quick visual impact that gives a feeling of real accomplishment, Implementing 5S, in my opinion, is not the way to introduce Lean. Many (most?) companies…

Atrendia Friday Video 23 – A Conference Call in Real Life

In this YouTube video you’ll relive those agonizing on-line meeting moments that make you want to pull out your hair!  You’ll be jumping up and down shouting: “So true!”.  Share this with colleagues – especially those who need some help in this area. Although it’s fun to poke fun at this, virtual conference calls are…

Atrendia Friday Video 19 – Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work

Many thanks to our client, Mitch Sowards, from www.entrust.us.com (Managed IT Services in Texas), for providing this Friday’s fabulously entertaining video.  We believe that we should work to be happy, but could that be backwards? In this fast-moving and entertaining talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that actually happiness inspires productivity. Duration: 12:21 Find out more about our…

Atrendia Friday Video 18 – When It Comes To Productivity, Technology Can Hurt And Help

Ok, this week the Atrendia Friday Video is not a video, but a podcast. I’m sure that many of you wonder if we are really getting a lot of productivity out of all these social “productivity” tools. This NPR podcast offers some social productivity tools as well as some balanced advice about productivity in general….