Coach John G. Agno is your own cultural attache; keeping you abreast of what's effective in leadership. People learn better and are positively motivated when supported by regular coaching.
PERSONAL COACHING Leadership onboarding coaching helps the executive adapt to the employer's culture, create rapport with their team and develop productive ways to achieve necessary goals.
SELF ASSESSMENT CENTER Leadership skills and style testing. Know how you motivate and coach people to gain success at work and in life.
WHAT IS LEADERSHIP? Leadership is an interactive conversation that pulls people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment.
LEADERSHIP TIPS “The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both.” Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)
Ignorance of our power isn't bliss at all, because this power works against us by default. If we're not aware of what it is and low to control it, we're in trouble.
But when we're aware of it, we can make sense of things and make changes. We can knock the lid off our perceived limitations and reach bigger and better goals.
This is where Automatic Influence can help, offering deep insights into the workings of human nature. When we understand how change happens and why, we can take control of the process. When we learn how to put the power to work, we discover how to take the controls instead of living by default. We learn a better and easier way to change.
Automatic Influence reveals a profound power source in human nature that energizes every emotion, drives every decision, and activates every action. When we try to change without triggering this power, change is hard. We grit our teeth, gut it out, lose steam, and give up.
But when we switch on this power, change is easier. Profoundly easier.
As author Erik Van Alstime explains, once we understand the source of our power, the next step is to direct it. What would our business and our life look like is we were free from fear? From everything inhibiting us and our teams?
Here are just some of the book's key advantages:
Reveals the secret of influence, and how to skyrocket our self-control and leadership.
Reveals the source of emotion and motivation, and why perceptual intelligence is much more powerful than emotional intelligence.
Helps us gain loyalty, coach people to be their best, and win friends.
There is a rule that keeping a safe distance between you and other vehicles when driving, while not allowing yourself to be distracted, can save your life.
Today, car makers have offered more technological gadgetry to keep drivers off their phones, but those efforts have often been thwarted as drivers have been frustrated in getting it all to work properly. That makes them even more distracted.
Car fatalities in the first half of 2016 rose 10.4% to 17,775 according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That is a steep increase following an already surprising uptick in fatalities last year.
A recent study by State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. of 1,000 drivers a year shows that 55% of drivers reported talking on a hand-held cellphone, 33% reported sending a text message and 26% surfed the internet on their phones.
Drivers ages 18 to 29 reported those behaviors at a considerably higher rate: 64% reported talking on a hand-held phone; 58% reported sending a text and 48% browsed the internet while driving.
The problem is that hands-free devices don't eliminate cognitive distraction.
One of the pitfalls to voice-activated technology in cars is how error-prone it is: a cognitive distraction scale of 1 (simple driving) to 5 (driving while doing an impossibly complex mental task, such as balancing a checkbook). Results showed that listening to the radio (1.21) or an audio book (1.75) showed a small increase in cognitive distraction. Drivers that used speech-to-text technology (3.06 and up) had the largest cognitive distraction rating.
Today, there is so much information in the vehicle that it is very easy to become distracted while driving.
[Editor's Note: The text version of the story is below.]
In a world of low and even negative rates, bond investors are so hungry for yield they're willing to accept high levels of risk.
For example, bond investors are increasingly embracing debt instruments known as covenant lite loans, which provide minimal protection should the issuer get into financial trouble.
Investors should pay close attention to this development, because this is exactly what happened before the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
Our April 2007 Elliott Wave Financial Forecast warned subscribers beforehand:
The only reason that the crisis has yet to spread to the corporate debt market in general is that lenders continue to slacken underwriting standards, just as they previously did in the mortgage sector. Consider, for instance, the latest boom instrument, a corporate product known as "covenant lite," bank loans that "subject borrowers to few of the usual performance requirements that have been standard in the past." Standard & Poor's says that $41 billion in lite loans have already been issued in 2007, a figure that is greater than that of the last 10 years combined.
Remember, cov-lite loans free the debt issuer from meeting normal fiscal disclosures and financial metrics, so the risk to lenders is high.
With that in mind, consider this (Bloomberg, Sept. 27):
Just 35 percent of new leveraged loans issued in 2016's first half had traditional covenants that require regular financial check-ups, compared with 100 percent in 2010.
A billionaire investor noted that "the fact that there are no covenants tells you that people are substituting yield for credit judgment."
But financial optimism is also reflected in the popularity of yet another high-risk debt instrument.
Here's a chart and commentary from our October Financial Forecast:
Another bond market revisitation from the last credit mania is the "red-hot" market for payment-in-kind (PIK) bonds. ... PIK bonds allow the issuer to pay interest in additional debt rather than cash. September is set to become the busiest month ever for PIK issuance, led by German auto component maker Schaeffler AG's $1.5 billion issue, the largest in history. Similar to the heightened risk associated with buying cov-lite loans, seasoned investors acknowledge the peril of buying PIK bonds.
As we've noted before, credit implosions develop when lenders relax credit standards and investors reach for yield.
This might well be the time to play it safe.
Unleash the power of the Wave Principle
Much like a great sports play; to appreciate a great market forecast, you have to see it. In fact, we'd like to show you four. Our examples do indeed show what can happen when Elliott analysis meets opportunity. But we're not asking you to attend a class in 'good calls.' In each of these four markets, the unfolding trends have (once again) reached critical junctures. You really, really want to see what we see, right now.
This article was syndicated by Elliott Wave International and was originally published under the headline These 2 Debt Instruments Pose Peril to Millions of Investors. EWI is the world's largest market forecasting firm. Its staff of full-time analysts led by Chartered Market Technician Robert Prechter provides 24-hour-a-day market analysis to institutional and private investors around the world.
If you follow your passion and focus your talent, you are going to have a special "something" that defines you, that sets you head and shoulders above the crowd.
"When your greatest talent intersects with your greatest passion," says author Pat Williams, "you have discovered your sweet spot in life." It's the spot that will result in the greatest impact on the world.
Zig Ziglar once said, "You are the only person on earth who can use your ability."
Executives are expected to set concrete objectives and create details, step-by-step plans to reach them. This approach may satisfy short-term considerations like quarterly earnings reports, but it produces modest innovation and evolutionary development at best.
As a result, the business can find itself in a performance plateau that it cannot seem to break out of.
Ingenuity and creativity are often considered something you either have or don't have...some say you're born with them or you're not. Ingenuity and creativity are a state of mind and yes, they are learned.
Success (or failure) is shaped not only by our experiences, but also by how we interpret and respond to those experiences.
Author Stephen Covey distinguishes between mental and physical creation, referring to the former as "first creation" and the latter as "second creation." The more potential we access, the greater the "first creation" (the idea we come up with) will be. Then we take action to convert the first creation into the second creation (the innovation itself).
In order to make the right decisions when transitioning between first and second creation, we must understand that sometimes the risk of doing nothing actually outweighs the risk of failure.
Innovative companies understand that "fail fast" doesn't mean fail on purpose. It means creating a smooth transition between first and second creation, and producing more workable second creations with an acceptable margin of risk.
In fact, self-control and mental discipline actually increase creativity and improve its application. A bold mind is also a controlled mind.
