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Working to Live: Making an occasional working vacation... work

Apr 2, 2015
5 min

Working to Live: Making an occasional working vacation... work

We all do it. Just as we all eat, sleep, and complain about politicians, we also are all guilty of at one time or another checking our work email (or doing actual work) even while on “vacation.” For some reason, we feel as though the latter is, as the former items are certainly, necessary to our continued survival. But such is not actually the case. In fact, it’s bad for our health to continue to work when we are supposed to be off the clock, and negates the vacations that ar

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Tales of a recovering engineer: there's a little creative in all of us

Mar 6, 2015
4 min

Tales of a recovering engineer: there's a little creative in all of us

- Elana Duffy There is a point in our business lives where we can all set aside our pre-supposed differences and get along. Reaching that point should be a goal for all of us, not just because it’s nice to think we can all sit and have coffee together, but because we need to do this for the betterment of business and productivity. I am an engineer. Engineers build. We think logically: we have a train of thought that boards at a station, travels a defined path, and disembarks

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The new prophet motive

Feb 19, 2015
4 min

The new prophet motive

- Frank Luby Two of the most frightening business headlines over the last three weeks both involved the state of California and a couple of guys named Cook. Benjamin Cook, a NASA scientist, co-authored a new study which claims that the western part of the United States will face its worst drought in 1,000 years, worse than anyone has previously expected. Fellow NASA scientist Tom Painter warned that "Water demand has passed supply in some areas. Throwing 30 years of drought o

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Writing Creatively: The hard part

Feb 13, 2015
5 min

Writing Creatively: The hard part

- Paul Mooney Creative writing is not something reserved only for those dreaming of selling their first literary masterpiece to the world at large. Storytelling is a key element of many things we do in business, from presentations to white papers (to stories at the water cooler, but we are trying to stay in the non-fiction realm here). I'll clear up any mystery right off the bat: the hard part is actually writing something. Not all that mysterious of a revelation, I grant you

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The value of valuing employees

Feb 5, 2015
4 min

The value of valuing employees

- Stacey Ebert Companies have many similarities to schools, only now we are all grown up. Jobs replace assignments, bosses replace teachers, and paychecks replace grades on report cards. Just as students want to impress their teachers, today it’s adult employees feeling the same about their supervisors. Valuing employees benefits all parties and might just be the secret to maintaining the best talent. Regardless of age, we all like to feel valued. Whether it’s public or one-o

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Post-Modern Work: What Millennials recognize and Baby Boomers don't

Jan 15, 2015
4 min

Post-Modern Work: What Millennials recognize and Baby Boomers don't

- Frank Luby The Economist welcomed us to 2015 with a handful of intriguing articles on the future of work. In “Workers On Tap”, they framed up the growing free-lance economy as a battle in workers’ minds between job security and time flexibility. The article implied older workers (which include me) place greater value on the former while Millennials prefer the latter. Other recent articles confirm that Millennials want even more than flexibility, they want input and interest

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Lessons From One of the Greatest TV Shows Ever

Jan 8, 2015
4 min

Lessons From One of the Greatest TV Shows Ever

- Paul Mooney Let me begin by directing you to the earlier post from Present Tense partner Elana Duffy highlighting the good business sense to be taken from Joseph Heller's classic novel Catch-22. It inspired me to write a similar article about my favorite novel, but since that's also Catch-22, that was a no-go. And since my second favorite novel is Frank Herbert's epic Dune, I figured I'd choose a different medium as I'm not quite sure how to tie a tale of space witches, sem

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Positive Vibes to Positive Profits: Professional Development that Works

Dec 3, 2014
4 min

Positive Vibes to Positive Profits: Professional Development that Works

- Stacey Ebert Professional development can be a trial. No one wants to sit through monotone presentations or worse, click-through online training that takes them away from the mounting pile of work sitting on their desk. That’s true no matter how strong our love for broadening horizons and expanding our knowledge. The irony is that professional development is critical to employee engagement, yet it often comes across as dull, mindless, and lacking energy. If those presentati

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