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“Nobody ever wrote down a plan to be broke, fat, lazy, or stupid. Those things are what happen when you don’t have a plan.”
― Larry Winget

Are You Leading Like A Dictator? Six Signs Your Management Style is Toxic

It doesn’t matter if someone is managing a nation or a four-person professional service firm; leading like a dictator leads straight to the gutter.

Dating as far back as anyone can remember, history has provided us with countless examples of dictators being overturned by “the people.” Most recently, we’ve watched the upheaval in the Middle East, spurred on by the not-so-early exit of Egypt’s former leader Hosni Mubarak. After thirty years of rule and pocket full of cash about a third as big as Egypt’s entire GDP, there were riots in the street and the dethroning of a ruler. While this is an extreme example, on a large scale, with tons of publicity, it doesn’t mean that the lessons seen here don’t apply to business management.

Take for example Jack Griffin, the former Chief Executive of Time Inc. The NY Times reported that employees described his leadership style as “brusque” and that he created an unworkable office culture for the Time Inc. team. He implemented “swift and sweeping” changes without communicating his purpose well and undermined his team’s confidence in their abilities. Although it would be a stretch to classify Griffin and Mubarak in the same category, it is reasonable to assume that Griffin was an inflexible leader. Consequently, in February, Griffin was forced out of Time Inc. after less than six months in office.

These examples are more common in business than most people think. In fact, from 2000 to 2006, one in four CEO tenures ended in forced dismissal, a rate of almost four percent annually according to Fortune magazine. While not all of these dismissals resulted from the boss being overly inflexible or too demanding, the fact remains that these dismissals do happen, and they happen when employees and coworkers are unhappy. And make no mistake; leading like a dictator is one of the fastest ways to foster workplace discontent.

The good news is that managers no longer need to wait until they get a pink slip to find out that they’ve been leading like dictators. Instead, they can just review the list below of the “Six Signs You’re a Dictator.” If three or more signs apply, then it’s time for some serious changes in leadership style.

Six Signs You’re a Dictator

The Company Revolves Around You —
Employees are able to describe you in one word: self-centered. Without your brilliant guidance, they all would be lost. Your inferiors are merely there to carry out orders that further your personal objectives. When success comes your way, you gladly take all of the credit and reward yourself with a little extra cash in your pocket, just like Mubarak did.
You Obsessively Control Employees —
You enjoy wasting time by micromanaging every employee task; you make people work precisely when, where, and how you want them to. You think of your office as an elementary school classroom where you need to monitor every movement, action, and breathe your students make.
You “Inspire” with Fear —
You like people to know that any mistake can be punishable by unemployment. You think the best way to motivate people is to make them feel like their job is something they must do to survive rather than something they want to do. All the emails you send out are typed in ALL CAPS and flagged as urgent to maximize employee panic.
Priorities Start and End with Work —
There is no room for excuses like “my kid is in the hospital” or “I’m not feeling well” when there’s work to do. To you, having a “work/life balance” and “personal time” don’t exist. You feel entitled to employees weekend time just as much as their work time and expect them to cater to your needs 24/7.
Respect Doesn’t Matter—
Your ideal image of a leader-follower relationship is to give as little as possible and get a lot back. Whenever you’re stressed or an employee has done something wrong, you don’t hesitate to “chew-out” a person in classic Jack Griffin style. After all, why waste the chance to make an example of one person and motivate the others to do their job right?
You are Never Wrong —
Why would you ever admit to being wrong when you have a line of scapegoats outside your office just waiting to take the blame? You’re the leader of the company, your image is its most important asset, and being wrong is not an option. You take credit for all the company successes and pass off failures on to your employees.
By running a business like a dictator, leaders create toxic jobs, stressful workplace environments and begin to carve out a legacy that even suppliers are ashamed to be involved with. However, by recognizing and actively addressing leadership deficiencies before disaster happens, employees are usually receptive to leaders who make a genuine change.

Trust and respect are the most essential ingredients to develop healthy leader-follower relationships. An effective boss needs to value positive social relationships in the office and nurture his or her employees to become self-directed individuals who will produce their best work, not because their boss threatens them, but because they want to. Employees need to be treated with respect, shown appreciation, and given recognition from their leaders to maintain engagement in their work. Just remember, idle threats and paychecks may be enough to get one task done, but in the long run they don’t come close to motivating employees the same way trust and respect do.

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7 Reasons '7 Habits of Highly Effective People' Lives on 25 Years Later

While thousands of leadership books are published each year, only a few might get some short-term success while the vast majority are quickly forgotten. So how has the bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People maintained its enviable shelf life for 25 years while so many other business and leadership books fade away fast?

First published August 15, 1989 by business management professor and leadership expert Stephen R. Covey, the book lays out seven core principles for achieving success in leadership and life—including often-quoted principles such as “Begin with the end in mind,” “First things first,” and “Think win-win.” The book has sold more than 25 million copies and continues to be used often in leadership training at companies and universities around the United States and worldwide. It’s been translated into 52 languages and helped build what’s now a $200 million enterprise.

After the huge initial success of the book, which remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 220 weeks, Covey was able to expand his training empire and author career. The book spawned an array of other books written by Covey, his family members, and others throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, including 7 Habits of Happy Kids, The 8th Habit, and 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families. More than 25 heads of state, including U.S. President Bill Clinton, asked Covey to help them learn and use the seven principles. Covey passed away in 2012 at age 79 after a bicycling accident but his empire lives on through the Utah-based global training company he helped build, Franklin Covey Co. The book’s enduring success has a lot to teach business owners and thought leaders even today, revealing lessons on clear thinking and motivational messaging a generation after it was published.

1. Be accessible.

The book’s title spawned its share of imitators, proving its catchiness. But it also drew readers in, says Sean Covey, one of Stephen’s sons, an executive vice president at Franklin Covey. Stephen had originally planned to call his book “Restoring the Character Ethic,” but ultimately decided it needed a snappier title that explained the book’s takeaway in an enticing, clear way.

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2. Make big ideas easy to relate to.

Covey spent decades reading and contemplating the works of many “great American thinkers,” including everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Henry James Thoreau. He fine-tuned his seven key principles, based on those years of reading and research, Sean says. But he took it a step further and injected real-life experiences and examples into his book to make the seven principles more relatable to readers.

3. Don’t rush it.

“This wasn’t something he pumped out over a few months,” Sean Covey says. “This was his life’s work.” Stephen first started using his seven principles in 1985 in leadership workshops at the Covey Leadership Center (which merged with Franklin Quest in 1997 to become Franklin Covey.) The workshops eventually became so popular that he decided to turn them into a book. Strangely enough, Sean adds, “at the time, they were a little bit nervous about publishing the book because they thought it might cannibalize the workshop they were teaching.”

Related: What You Can Learn From Nintendo's Weird and Wonderful 125 Years

4. Keep the message alive.

The popularity of his book helped convince Covey that many people yearned for such information but needed help incorporating the principles into their lives and work. He expanded on the principles in his book by creating new training programs around them. Today, many people buy the book as part of their leadership training. As part of the 25th anniversary, Franklin Covey has introduced a smartphone app called Living the 7 Habits for iOS and Android and introduced an updated (“4.0”) version of its training program for organizations and individuals.

5. Craft universal lessons.

By the late 1990s, the book was being published all over the world and today “it’s just as popular in China, Puerto Rico and Brazil as it is in the [United States,]” Sean Covey says.

The seven key principles are so enduring, Covey says, because they are timeless and universal. They point to real-life experiences—interactions between people—that anyone can relate with. Thanks to the timelessness of the advice, the book's original text has been changed only slightly over the years.

6. Share ideas that can have impact.

David Esposito, who runs a personal and professional development consulting firm and an early-stage medical device company in Portage, Michigan says the book has also had a profound influence on him and his life. Two principles in the book—“First things first” and “understand before being understood”—have particularly resonated with him as he tried to balance his family life with his career. It helped him understand the importance of learning others’ points of views before making judgments or expecting others to see his point of view. “I have pen markings throughout the book,” he says, “but certain parts have really changed how I view the world.”

7. Be clear and organized.

DaVita Healthcare Partners, a Denver-based kidney dialysis provider, frequently uses 7 Habits in its employee and management training programs for of its more than 50,000 employees worldwide. Jennifer Colosimo, vice president of DaVita’s “Wisdom Group" and a former executive at FranklinCovey, says she first read the book in 1994 and recently trained a group of 50 DaVita executives on the seven principles. She cites its clear message as a major driver of its popularity. “[Covey] organized these principles in a simple way that—no matter where you were—you’d be able to understand them,” she says. Colosimo notes that even Covey frequently acknowledged these weren't unique ideas. “He just organized them well.”

Esposito first read the book as a young sales rep in 1994 and still keeps it handy on the bookshelf in his office. “There’s a lot of pump-up [business] books out there,” he says. “This book …took what could be very complicated ideas and boiled them down very clearly.”

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The 6 Elements of Persuasion (Infographic)

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236497

The 6 Elements of Persuasion (Infographic) When you want to get your customer to say yes, keep these principles in mind.

Creating a personal budget > Dave Ramsey's Envelope System

The envelope system is a key component of the Total Money Makeover plan because it works. Here are a few simple basics for starting a cash envelope system:

Budget each paycheck.

Budget is a dirty word to most people, but you must budget down to the last dime if you're going to successfully implement the envelope system.

Divide and conquer.

Of course, there will be budget items that you cannot include in your envelope system, like bills paid by check or automatic withdraw. However, you can create categories like food, gas, clothing and entertainment.

Fill 'er Up.

After you've categorized your cash expenses, fill each envelope with the money allotted for it in your budget. For example, if you allow $100 for clothing, put $100 in cash in your clothing envelope for the month.

When it's gone, it's gone.

Once you've spent all the money in a given envelope, you're done spending for that category. If you go on a shopping spree and spend the $100 in your clothing envelope, you can't spend any more on clothes until you budget for that category again. That means no visits to the ATM to withdraw more money!

Don't be tempted.

While debit cards can't get you directly into debt, if used carelessly, they can cause you to over-spend. There's something psychological about spending cash that hurts more than swiping a piece of plastic. If spending cash whenever possible can become a habit, you'll be less likely to over-spend or buy on impulse.

Give it time.

It will take a few months to perfect your envelope system. Don't give up after a month or two if it's not clicking. You'll get the hang of it and see how beneficial the envelope system is as you dump debt, build wealth, and achieve financial peace! See ... simple!

Certainly, some bills may come in at different times of the month, so you'll need to adjust your written game plan to take it one step further. You need to plan the budget based upon your pay periods.
Say that you get paid twice a month. If you can write down which bills you plan on paying from each paycheck, you will not be left with a surprise bill. Spend each month's income and each individual paycheck on paper before it comes in.

Have some fun!

There's also no problem in adding for "blow money"—money to have a little fun with! As long as you and your spouse have agreed on it, you are fine. There should be no lying. Agree on your budget, agree on your fun money, and be open. Fun money can be anything you want it to be. There are no rules on that envelope, unlike money in the "entertainment" envelope that is used specifically for entertainment.

Start now! Get on a plan and organize your cash with a wide range of envelope systems.

Risk Everything,
- Nike

Nike Football: The Last Game ft. Ronaldo, Neymar Jr., Rooney, Zlatan, Iniesta & more 'The Last Game' is a story about risky football versus safe football. The scientist and the clones want to prove that riskless football is more effective. Ro...

I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'
Muhammad Ali

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
- Ernest Hemingway

15 Rules of Motivation for Harvard Students

1. If you fall asleep now, your fancy will appear in dreams, for sure. Although, if you prefer studying to sleeping, your fancy will come true.

2. When you think it is too late, it is still timely.

3. Suffering from studying is temporary. Suffering from nescience is infinite.

4. Studying is not about time, it is about efforts.

5. Life is not for studying only, but if you are not able to pass even through this part of the life, what then are you good at, at all?

6. Exertion and efforts can be pleasant, as well.

7. Only those who fulfill everything earlier, only those who expend efforts, can be truly delighted with their success.

8. To succeed in everything is not for everyone. Success though comes only accompanied by self- improvement and determination.

9. Time slips past.

10. Slaver today will turn into tears tomorrow.

11. Realists are those who contribute something to the future.

12. Your salary is directly-proportional to your level of education.

13. Today will never come back.

14. Even now your enemies are greedy turning the leaves of books.

15. Only sweating will you be earning.

Bus stop in Baltimore