4 Ways To Create A Workplace Environment That Breeds Greatness
Check out the latest news reports from Wall Street and the focus is almost always on profits and losses.
How much is the market up or down? Which corporation made how much money this quarter?
But in recent years, some CEOs have begun to rethink the idea that profits should be the driver behind every decision. Instead, there’s an emerging philosophy that having a purpose beyond money and putting people first – especially employees – places companies in a better position to succeed in the long run.
“A piece of advice I got from a mentor a long time ago was this: ‘Your job as CEO is not to grow a company, your job is to grow people who grow the company,’ ” says Adam Witty, co-author with Rusty Shelton of Authority Marketing: How to Leverage 7 Pillars of Thought Leadership to Make Competition Irrelevant.
“If you want to be a big business that is respected far and wide, you’ve got to get into the business of growing people. Watching others learn, grow, and develop has been one of the most rewarding parts of my entrepreneurial journey.”
Witty, founder and CEO of Advantage|ForbesBooks (www.advantagefamily.com), says his goal is always to hire smart people, and to create a working environment that breeds greatness in them.
He has a number of tactics for achieving that. Just a few of those include:
Ultimately, Witty says, it’s important for both businesses and their employees to adapt to a changing world, or else they will find themselves left behind. “You may not like change,” Witty says, “but you will dislike irrelevance even more.”
About Adam Witty
Adam Witty, co-author with Rusty Shelton of Authority Marketing: How to Leverage 7 Pillars of Thought Leadership to Make Competition Irrelevant, is the CEO of Advantage|ForbesBooks (www.advantagefamily.com). Witty started Advantage in 2005 in a spare bedroom of his home. The company helps busy professionals become the authority in their field through publishing and marketing. In 2016, Advantage launched a partnership with Forbes to create ForbesBooks, a business book publisher for top business leaders. Witty is the author of seven books, and is also a sought-after speaker, teacher and consultant on marketing and business growth techniques for entrepreneurs and authors. He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily and USA Today, and has appeared on ABC and Fox.
===========================
Mike Lee, the junior United States Senator from Utah, can help Salt Lake City's George "The Stork" Theodore, Moroni's Bruce Christensen and 639 other former players who don’t receive pensions from having played Major League Baseball (MLB).
In their respective post-baseball lives, Theodore was a guidance counselor for the Granite School District, while some of the jobs Christensen held included working for a cement plant company and as a certified warrantor.
Sadly, the contributions of men like the Stork, who only two years ago was named "Educator of the Year" by the South Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce, and Christensen do not mean much to MLB or the union representing today's current players, the Major League Baseball Players' Association (MLBPA).
See, the rules for receiving MLB pensions changed in 1980. Theodore and Christensen, who respectively played for the New York Mets and California Angels, do not receive pensions because they didn't accrue four years of service credit, That is what ballplayers who played between 1947 – 1979 needed to be eligible for the pension plan.
Instead, they all receive nonqualified retirement payments based on a complicated formula that had to have been calculated by an actuary.
In brief, for every quarter of service a man had accrued, he’d get $625. Four quarters (one year) totaled $2,500. Sixteen quarters (four years) amounts to the maximum, $10,000.
Meanwhile, a vested retiree receiving an MLB pension can earn as much as $220,000. The payment can't be passed on to a surviving spouse or designated beneficiary either. So neither of Theodore's loved ones, such as his wife, Sabrina nor his son, Alexander, nor Christensen's wife, Laura, and his children Daniel, Sadie and Nicholas, will receive that money when they each eventually die.
In light of Forbes' recent report that the players' pension and welfare fund is valued at $2.7 billion, I think it is reprehensible that both the league and the union representing the current players, the MLBPA are against taking better care of its non-vested retirees, many of whom are filing for bankruptcy at advanced ages, having banks foreclose on their homes and are so sickly and poor that they cannot afford adequate health insurance coverage.
Because of this arrogance, I believe it's time to repeal baseball's 95-year-old anti-trust exemption.
MLB maintains the loss of the antitrust exemption would affect its minor league operations nationwide and create instability through team relocations.
A Stanford professor emeritus of economics, Roger Noll doesn't believe baseball would suffer much if the exemption were tossed. "While baseball may not like having less control over where teams play and where they can televise their games, it would not be economically threatened if its antitrust exemption were to be weakened or even eliminated," Noll told the Stanford News Service two years
In a 2002 Slate article entitled "Baseball's Con Game," Rutgers’ David Greenberg wrote that the exemption "stems from the government's naive insistence that baseball is only a game. Alone among professional sports, baseball enjoys immunity from antitrust prosecution because neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has been willing to overturn an ancient decision that baseball is merely an amusement, not a commercial enterprise."
The idea that baseball isn’t a commercial enterprise is ludicrous, especially since Forbes recently reported that the average team's value is $1.54 billion -- 19 percent more than in 2016.
That's where Senator Lee comes in. The Senator, whose district offices are located in Salt Lake City, St. George and Ogden, is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights that would have jurisdiction over the repeal of the exemption.
Maybe he can remind the 30 club owners that they're lucky to have their exemption. That's why they should do right by the retirees like Christensen and "The Stork" who aren't as fortunate as them.
A freelance writer based in New York, Douglas J. Gladstone has been published in multiple newspaper, magazine and webzines. He is also the author of two books, including "A Bitter Cup of Coffee; How MLB & The Players Association Threw 874 Retirees a Curve." His website is at www.gladstonewriter.com.
======================
