Improvement Points is a free service providing a key thought or quotation from one of my articles, provided three times per week, directly to your e-mail inbox. Each complimentary Improvement Point links directly into the full article on our web site that spawned it. If you’d like to read more about that day’s Improvement Point, you can choose to click through to the short article for a quick five-minute read. This is your opportunity for a short pause that refreshes, is an inspirational vitamin, or a quick performance boost. You can circulate especially relevant or timely articles or Improvement Points to your team, Clients, or colleagues for further discussion or action.

Here are the three most highly read Improvement Points we sent out in August:

In the middle of a meeting with a few colleagues I caught myself saying, “Once we get through this crazy period and things get back to normal…” Then it hit me. I had been saying something like that for at least a year or two.
– from Jim Clemmer’s article, “This Crazy Period of Constant Change is Normal“
http://www.clemmer.net/articles/article_75.aspx

Many rigid managers try to use “change management” or improvement planning to regulate and direct the random and chaotic events swirling around them. They aren’t comfortable with letting their improvement plan and path to higher performance unfold and evolve toward their vision, values, purpose, goals and priorities. In other words, they think they can start with the answers. They’re not comfortable with learning.
– from Jim Clemmer’s article, “Change Management Can Lead to Rigidity and Resistance to Change“
http://www.clemmer.net/articles/article_53.aspx

Effective mobilizing and energizing goes well beyond “doing” programs to the “being” or culture of a team, organization, or any group including a family. That culture is a set of shared attitudes and accumulated habits around “the way we do things here.” The culture provides the context or backdrop that either energizes or exhausts people.
– from Jim Clemmer’s article, “The Motivation Myth“
http://www.clemmer.net/articles/article_39.aspx