It isn’t sufficient just to want – you’ve got to ask yourself what you are going to do to get the things you want

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing a think exactly right

Edward Simmons

People living deeply have no fear of death

Anais Nin

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Welcome back Bill

Courage is grace under pressure.

Ernest Hemingway, Author

It is wise to keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.

Roger Babson, American entrepreneur and business theorist

Well done is better than well said.

Benjamin Franklin, American inventor and statesman

Life is too short to be little.

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British prime minister and writer

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The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers.

Henri Frederic Amiel

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Mahatma Gandhi

There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept responsibility for changing them.

Denis Waitley

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You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.

Aristotle

However long the night, the dawn will break.

African Proverb

Courage is knowing what not to fear.

Plato

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We can never make peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.

Dalai Lama

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Mark Twain

I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.

Mohandas Gandhi

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Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.

Harold S. Geneen

If you care at all, you’ll get results. If you care enough, you’ll get incredible results.

Jim Rohn

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.

Bob Dylan

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I was running through past comments and came across one from Christian Leboutin who contributed a quote that comes to us from Publilus Syrus  “It is a very hard undertaking to seek to please everybody.”

This should have a corollary “If is everything is important then nothing is.”

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Let’s start a New Year – 2013 Practice. How about you take a process, any process and give it a fresh review?

Sit with your group and talk about the things that you do. Discuss them openly and without bias. Choose something that someone thinks might be done a little bit better. Have them take responsibility for a review of that process in the coming week with a report back to the group the following Friday. Then select a new one the following week and so on.

At the end of the year you will have had fifty two processes reviewed. The priority will have come from the group itself not you and one of your team members will have led the review and reported the findings back to the group. This should result in more engaged and motivated team members. They will all have their fingertprints all over everything that you do as a team.

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Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

Henry David Thoreau

Dreams are the touchstone of our character

Henry David Thoreau

All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers

Orison Swett Marsden

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There continues to be more research suggesting that incentives don’t work. This should lead us to reexamine our commission programs shouldn’t it?

Barney Frank, that once famous or infamous (your call) congressman, spoke at the Annual Awards dinner of the trade newspaper “American Banker” in 2004. He began his talk with a question “At the level of pay that those of you who run banks get, why the hell do you need a bonus to do the right thing?” Of course there was no answer given there was silence, so he continued. “Do we really have to bribe you to do you jobs?”

The same holds true for incentive programs on all manner of jobs. Are we truly trying to modify behavior with these programs or just pay more money?

I think it is time to ask some questions for instance:-

  • Why do we pay the same commission to equipment sales people who replace one of your brans as the commission for replacing a competitive brand?
  • Why do we pay a higher commission on the lowest margin products, undercarriage, as we do on the highest margin products, maintenance programs?

Just wondering why but then again that is what I do. Check out the studies and you will find that salaries are a better payment plan than commission programs.

The time is now.