Help Your Employees Make Better Decisions. Start by Removing All Restrooms.

Help Your Employees Make Better Decisions. Start by Removing All Restrooms.

Periodically in this column, I don my business consultant hat (a stylish Italian grey fedora) to share innovative business strategies to grow your business and improve your employees’ productivity. As a sought-after business process improvement expert and author of the popular business handbook, Stop Tasering Your Team – and 50 Other Strategies to Improve Employee Morale, I can help businesses prosper – if only they’d stop and listen to me for once.

I have frequently been approached by executives from Microsoft to Amazon.com to Ninja Ned’s Car Stereo & Hot Tub Emporium on South Aurora Avenue – all asking me the same question: How did you get past security? But as soon as they discover who I am, they are often surprised to learn about my out-of-the-box business strategies (usually as they are escorting me out-of-the-premises).

In this installment, I share the thought-provoking conclusions of a recent Dutch study published in the scholarly journal, Psychological Science. The study tested people’s decision-making ability when their bladders were full and found that people with full bladders tended to make better decisions and were better able to control and hold off making impulsive, costly decisions, leading to better judgment. (I swear I’m not making this up.) Other findings included that Dutch researchers appear to have way too much time on their hands.

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My painful dark confession

My painful dark confession

I’ve decided to come out of the closet about my little dark secret. I’ve lived with it in quiet shame my entire life. Until now, nobody has known about it. Not even my kids. Will they respect me after they read my public confession? Will you?

I simply can’t hold this secret in any longer. I hope I won’t ruin my marriage. This is really hard to talk about. I am searching for the right words. Okay, here it comes……

I am ………… a lifelong……… slooooooow reeeeeeader.

I confess. My slow reading problem started in first grade. I would read a passage like this: See Dick. See Jane. See Spot. See Dick throw the ball. See Jane catch the ball. See Jane through the ball. See Spot catch the ball… and I’d think, Golly! (What do you want – I was in first grade.) This is going to take forever! Couldn’t they have shaved off five pages simply by stipulating in one concisely-worded sentence that the three of them were playing with the ball? Little did I know then that Dick and Jane were just the first chapter of my slow reading saga.

In seventh grade, our teacher at my all-boys school, Mr. Alanson, made us read Marjori Kinnan Rawling’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1938 novel The Yearling, about a young deer named Flag that becomes a family pet, then eventually dies, and everybody cries. Scientists should have stopped searching then and there for a cure for insomnia. I had discovered it. Took me forever to wade through this award-winningly boring book. [Suggestion to the author: Marjori, next time, spend a little more time on plot development and little less time describing a tattered leaf’s meandering journey down a gurgling creek.]

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BREAKING NEWS! TIM JONES IS NOT FUNNY!

BREAKING NEWS! TIM JONES IS NOT FUNNY!

Read all about it. Newspapers and magazines all over the USA are joining forces in asking Tim Jones to PLEASE STOP SUBMITTING YOUR WRITING SAMPLES! In other news, the stoplight at 5th and Main has finally been repaired. Frustrated drivers say “It’s about time.”

It’s hard to believe I have been at this humor blog for more than 25 years. That may be in part because it’s actually been less than ten. See what I just did? I made a joke. Didn’t find it funny? Join the club. That’s been the reaction so far from just about every newspaper, magazine and online news site in response to my submissions of humor articles over the past year.

I have reached out to publications ranging from The Huffington Post to Field and Stream, and have pretty much received the same response: Who are you and how did you get my email address?

Over the history of this weekly humor blog, I have commented on everything from how to become a Tiger Mother parent to my fleeting friendship with an internet scammer; from my recent colonoscopy to my solution for the US debt crisis; from how the iPad compares to Jesus Christ to my exploration of why the state of Montana hates me. And there is one thing all of these brilliant pieces of satire have in common: NO PUBLICATION WANTS MY MATERIAL.

I’ve been collecting a list of reasons publications have given for rejecting my humor submissions. Below is just a sampling of some of the more common responses:

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