Water, Flat Heads, Promotions, Productivity & Trends

1. De-stress:? A Blue Tip
2. Please Don't?Promote Me!
3. Why Ambitious?Women Have Flat Heads??
4. C-Level Trends for 2025- Part 3: Technology
5. Productivity:?Not Just a Pretty Word
6. Econ Recon

De-Stress:? A Blue Tip

Holiday décor is up. Black Friday has turned into a week or month. I admit to feeling some stress about the upcoming next 7 weeks!

From Adam Grant, I read something? interesting:? Being in nature is restorative. But the ideal place to relax is near water.

Recent?experiments ?show that after just 2 minutes of viewing water outdoors, blood pressure and heart rate drop. It's more?calming ?to look at a lake, pool, or stream than trees or grass. ?A?growing ?body of evidence suggests that blue spaces can be more soothing than green spaces. Patients?recovering ?from heart surgery felt less anxious—and requested less pain medication—after looking at water than a forest. And for dental patients about to undergo surgery, hypnosis didn’t relax them, but viewing an aquarium?did .

The psychologists behind the research speculate that it may have evolutionary roots: since being attuned to visual cues for water helped our ancestors avoid dehydration, the mere sight of water can be a relief. Marine biologist Wallace Nichols wrote in?Blue Mind , water tends to induce “a mildly meditative state characterized by calm, peacefulness, unity, and a sense of general happiness and satisfaction with life in the moment.”

If you’re looking for a way to decompress, how can you use this blue tip to your life?

Don’t Promote Me!

For generations the dream of many in any organization was to be promoted and enjoy the privileges of rank. Instead, according to an article in Business Insider, 42% of respondents to a survey indicate that they “no longer aspire to the fancy titles, corner offices, and bigger paychecks that come with a promotion. Many are trying to fly under the radar, desperately hoping they won't get a tap on the shoulder. Others are outright declining promotions — or even asking for a?demotion?to a role with fewer responsibilities.”

If you’re trying to grow your business, it’s more than just increasing the top line, you need more managers and leaders to run the organization to create the growth and then support it. This short article explores why?“Nearly half of Americans don’t want a promotion.” ??

?“Why do Ambitious Women Have Flat Heads?”

Dame Stephanie Shirley: Refugee, Entrepreneur and Philanthropist

If I ask you to name the great tech entrepreneurs of our time you would no doubt?list Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and of course, ?Dame Stephanie Shirley.

Dame Stephanie Shirley?

Well before the men listed above, Dame Shirley (after escaping Nazi Germany as a child) built a UK technology company in the Dark Ages of the information era. Remarkably, it was intentionally an all-woman software company which eventually came to be valued at $3 billion).?Among her firm’s accomplishments was the programming of the flight data recorder on the first supersonic plane, the Concorde.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes for her short TED talk that recaps her remarkable achievement in building an all-woman tech company in a male dominated industry well before many of them even began. Among other insights offered in Dam Shirley’s talk is the explanation of “Why Ambitious Women Have Flat Heads.” ??(FYI, the title “Dame” is given to women in the UK who have been awarded the Order of the British Empire for contributions to the arts and sciences).

You can find a short bio of Dame Shirley here ?and if you may want to read her autobiography???“Let it Go: My Extraordinary Story-From Refugee to Entrepreneur to Philanthropist .” ?

C-Level Trends for 2025: Part 3

Technology trends for 2025: AI and Beyond

It would be difficult to find any company that can afford to ignore technology in its strategic plan; especially AI.?But not every company is up to speed. As Vistage Speaker Marc Emmer writes: ?“One?recent study?revealed that only about 10% of companies are using AI in any material way while 51% are “experimenting and beta testing. Most companies are only using AI to enable modest improvements in their back-end operations.”

Before you finish your strategic plan, be sure to study Emmer’s 3rd installment of 4 on the trends impacting small and midsize businesses. “Technology Trends for 2025: AI and Beyond .

Productivity: Not just a pretty word

A few weeks ago I featured?a scary graphic that predicted that the US Labor Force will only grow at 0.2% per year .?If the economy continues to grow at even a normal pace, the labor shortage will only get worse.?In addition to constant recruiting,?helping your employees become more productive is mandatory.

Vistage is offering a new research report on productivity?that offers proven strategies and techniques and?will save you considerable time and effort in your own productivity initiatives.

Read it now (PDF) click here.

Econ Recon

“A Trillion Here and a Trillion There”:? The late Senator Everett Dirksen was reputed to have remarked about the growth of government in the 1960s ?“A billion here, a billion there….after a while it adds up to real money.”?Change the “b’s” to “t’s” and the quote is now appropriate for our financial straits a half century later. (The senator later claimed he never said the “after a while” part; but liked it so much he decided to let people think he said it.???)

One of the more interesting announcements after President Trump’s re-election is a promise to create a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to be led by tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswarmy. Musk in particular has promised “at least $ 2 trillion” in annual spending cuts. Reducing the size and increasing the efficiency of government is laudable but much of government spending is fixed (interest on the debt) or consists of entitlements set by law such as Medicare and Social Security. Can cutting it by $ 2 trillion in a single year be done actually be done??I wish Musk and Ramaswarmy well in their task, but a little education on the numbers may be helpful.?

Here are several resources to educate yourself.:

Economist Brian Wesbury is offering a two-part look at the real numbers around the government spending.?His one page post ?“Is there Room to Cut? Examining Federal Spending Part 1 ” features a graph in the center of the page that puts the opportunity for cost cutting into perspective:

• The orange area?is mandatory?(social security, Medicare, and other contractual commitments). Only Congress can change this and given the widespread dependence on both, change is problematic.
• The yellow is interest on the debt, hardly optional.
• The blue area is “discretionary” spending?which theoretically can be reduced but this is where the discussion gets political…and when constituents of the Senators and Representatives from both parties start screaming about the cuts to?their?programs, we’ll find out why politics is called “the art of the possible.”

Wesbury concludes that “just 15% of the budget is truly discretionary” and my well require significant political “horse trading” to make any impact at all. Part 2 of this valuable information next week.?

If you’d like an excellent?video tutorial?on the US Federal Budget, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on his USA Facts website, will walk you through the numbers and explain “What is the US federal budget?” ? (Highly recommended).

“An Economy Adrift”:? That’s how ITR Economics’ Brian Beaulieu describes the current economic data. Contrasting movements in retail, metals, inflation all moving in ways that make him think that “there something interesting going on here.?Find out what else he thinks in his latest FedWatch.

This issue is a cornucopia of topics - just like next week's Thanksgiving meal. I'll be publishing next week before the Thanksgiving holiday but want to wish you and yours a wonderful Thanksgiving. I am thankful to you for being in my network!

Sue Tinnish, PhD,?Vistage Chair, Facilitator, & Executive Coach

Find me easily at: 847.404.7325, [email protected] , Twitter:?@STinnish, LinkedIn: www.dhirubhai.net/in/suetinnish , Website: https://vistage.com/chairs/sue.tinnish