Extremely successful business professionals in the volatile business world of 2018 get it.  The rate of change, the dynamic markets, the geopolitical issues, the amount of information coming at us, and the lack of sleep are all colluding to make our lives as difficult as possible.  It goes without saying that if you really wanted to – and didn’t need to eat, sleep, or enjoy time with your loved ones - you could answer emails, work on projects, and develop innovative ideas 24 hours a day, seven days a week and still barely make a dent on the big list of things to do.

July is now over, and it is quarterly report season again!  This week and next, publicly held companies are in the process of delivering the good news and the bad news to their investors and the analysts that cover their stocks.  As a lead subject matter expert in the design, development, and delivery of business simulation-centric learning solutions that build financial acumen skills, this week of quarterly calls is always a busy time for me. Many of my clients that I deliver financial acumen sessions for have asked me to continue the learning process by conducting tailored webinars that review the latest quarterly results and tie them back to the key concepts of the learning program as a method of learning reinforcement.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard the term “Sanctimonious Snowflake” used in a variety of ways and from a variety of people ranging from the Attorney General of the United States to a Plant Manager talking about the difficulties of providing constructive feedback to new employees who’ve been in the workforce for just a couple of years.  At a time when civility in language and approach to others in our society and business environments is low and sinking fast, I’m thinking that using this term when giving feedback is probably not the best feedback strategy if one is actually serious about achieving a positive business outcome.

One of the most important and impactful changes within the corporate performance management process has been the evolution of performance reviews to performance partnerships.  A performance partnership is a collaborative and iterative process between a manager and an employee with the goal of improved individual and company performance.  In ideal circumstances, a partnership takes out the “adversarial” aspects of performance management and creates a true win-win-win situation for the employee, manager, and company

Many organizations consider outsourcing as a tactic that can reduce operating costs and increase overall operational efficiencies. When you increase your operational efficiencies, you can use the savings and invest them into other efficiencies, customer service, or product innovations. Outsourcing involves procuring products and services from organizations outside of your own company and quite often from third party organizations in other countries.  In many large organizations, outsourcing can include core business processes such as payroll, information technology, financial services, copying, trash removal, cleaning services, marketing, advertising, training, and even complete sales teams.  The total amount of global outsourcing in 2017 was 88.9 billion of which $64.3 billion was from IT outsourcing and $24.6 billion was from standard business process outsourcing.