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 popular Improvement Points we sent out in October:

Inspiring and Energizing with Strong Verbal Communications
When I was eighteen and starting my Culligan career I took a Dale Carnegie sales course. I followed that with their public speaking course. Both had a major impact on my leadership performance. I came to realize that learning the basic persuasion skills of clarifying and simplifying what we’re trying to say, tuning in to our audience, and grabbing them by the handles of their emotions, is critical to effective leadership.

Measurement and Feedback are Vital to Improvement
Managers aren’t comfortable with feedback. They haven’t learned how to get it and how give it effectively. So measurements turn into “gotchas” to be avoided.


Choice More than Chance Determines Our Circumstance
Dwelling on our problems rather than our possibilities comes all too naturally. We often expect the worst and then say “see, I told you that would happen” when it happens. Too often we choose to curse the darkness rather than light a candle.