Most managers think that motivating employees is the #1 part of their job. Or they make the distinction between managers, who attempt to get things done by delegating and motivating employees through incentives and discipline, and leaders, who create a compelling vision and motivate employees through empowerment and inspiration. But everyone seems to feel that motivating employees is the critical aspect of any supervisory position. If I think about my [...]
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Dear Mom, You Were Right, I Was Wrong
Dear Mom, It is hard to fully appreciate your parents until you become one yourself. Although I consider myself to be a relatively mature, well-adjusted and even wise adult in my 40s, I did not fully understand nor appreciate your contribution to my life until having my own children in the past two years. Having a child is life-changing—certainly one of the most impactful things to have ever happened to [...]
A Balanced Approach to Positive Leadership
Earlier this year, I taught my first semester of a new online course on Positive Leadership in Spas and Hospitality for the UC Irvine Extension certification program in Spa and Hospitality Management. Because it was an online course, it attracted an incredible diversity of students from all over the world. There was a good mix of students from Asia, Europe and North America. And the experience of the students varied [...]
You Too Can Become a Musician: The Psychology of Talent
Do you have musical talent? Do you wish you did? A small percentage of us seem to have the gift of music but most (if not all) of us wish we had it. Whatever our favorite musical genre is, there is a natural tendency to admire our favorite musicians, listen raptly to the incredible sounds they are able to produce with their voice or their instrument, and to wish or [...]
Why First Impressions Don’t Matter Much
A great article by Andrea Petersen appeared in the Wall Street Journal Travel section last week outlining the “Hidden Ways Hotels Court Guests Faster.” The article focused on all the ways that different hotel brands are trying to dazzle their guests with an excellent first impression. Hotel industry executives (myself included) were likely to be very interested in this article as we often talk in this business about the importance [...]
Just Be a Parent
Being a parent is not easy. I would say it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s also the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. (I talk about this “parental paradox” in my article on “The Peaks of Parenting.”) The challenges are great. To put it simply, being a parent takes time and energy on an order of magnitude far beyond what any non-parent could possibly understand (I certainly didn’t [...]
Innovation Lessons from the Idea Factory
Before Twitter, before Facebook, before Google, and before Apple, there was Bell Labs: “From its beginnings in the 1920s until its demise in the 1980s, Bell Labs—officially, the research and development wing of AT&T—was the biggest, and arguably the best, laboratory for new ideas in the world. From the transistor to the laser, from digital communications to cellular telephony, it’s hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn’t [...]
Anxiety: It’s Not What You Have, It’s What You Do
“If we don’t recognize what is going on in our heads we find it easy to assume that somehow our anxieties come to us ready made from the outside. It can feel as though they are happening to us and that they are caused by something outside of us.” According to Charles Merrett, clinical psychology as a treatment for anxiety doesn’t really work the way we’d like it to. And [...]
Pampering is Not a Dirty Word
I just returned from the SpaTec event in Orlando, Florida where I was invited to give the keynote address on “In Defense of Pampering.” For the past few years I have been arguing that the spa industry, in its attempts to be more relevant in a down economy has been turning its back on the one thing that sets spas apart from other healing institutions in our society (you can [...]
An Angel and a Hero: Courage Personified
A few weeks back, I wrote an article called, “You Could Lose it All,” about confronting the risk of tremendous loss. Coincidentally, the week I wrote that article, my mother almost “lost it all” in a freak car accident on a stormy night. She was driving home from San Francisco to San Jose on a Friday night at 9:30 p.m. in the fast lane on I-280 in a torrential downpour. [...]
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