Apple put privacy back under your control recently with its latest iPhone update, iOS 14.5, and the new feature called App Tracking Transparency. Apple announced this change last June and Facebook threw a historical hissy fit. Google has sworn to protect you from unwanted cookies but that’s only because it will strengthen their position as a dominant search advertiser and their business model is much more diversified than Facebook. Otherwise, Google would be crying a loud, sloppy cry just like Facebook.

It is no shock that consumers want digital privacy. What might surprise you is the fact that most marketers are doing everything they can to stop it from happening. So, what’s the big deal with tracking, privacy and advertising? It helps to understand the status quo and then we can take a peek at where we’re headed. Until now, you’ve been tracked like a lab rat and marketers are not giving up without a colossal fight. The Wall Street Journal recently...

In his latest book, The Quick Fix, author Jesse Singal, takes psychological research to task. He demonstrates over and over again how only half of all published experimental psychological findings are successfully replicated by other researchers. The subfield of social psychology fares even worse. Without a doubt, you’ve seen these trendy and popular concepts touted in TED Talks and the best-seller corners of your favorite bookstores. I’ve written about them at length, here and elsewhere. They offer simple solutions to complex problems. And, that’s why they are so popular.

Who wants to be told the solution to their management, marketing or leadership challenge is too difficult to cover in a single TED talk, book or research article? 

I get more than a handful of member requests and questions sent to my desk each day. That’s after the easy ones have been filtered out and handled by the appropriate team member. I welcome the hard...

Last week I was browsing through a book on Epicurean Philosophy and stumbled across this great quote by Epicurus, who lived from 341 to 270 B.C.

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

How true this still rings today, 2,300 years later. Put in terms my thick little skull can understand, “Where we are today was once a dream.”

Doctor, lawyer, specialist, audiologist, professional practice owner, mother, father, husband, wife, partner, aunt, uncle, brother, sister, best friend – all of these accomplishments were once a dream. How much time are we spending chasing after the next dream versus living our current one?

Listen. I’m the first person to encourage you to keep chasing after new dreams and bigger goals. That’s called growth. However, growth doesn’t always mean getting bigger, it also means going deeper.

I specifically chose the...

As we continue to navigate the pandemic, our administrative team members have been working remotely since March 2020. Here’s what we’ve learned:

• Schedule fewer meetings
• No meetings back-to-back
• Designated “meeting-free time”
• Flexible work hours
• Find ways for remote colleagues to socialize 

We’ve also discovered lots of things don’t work as well online as they do in the real world. For example, long meetings. With longer team meetings in the office, like our half-day training sessions, employees could get up, stretch their legs, take a coffee break, socialize in the hallway on breaks, etc. With online meetings, an hour seems like an eternity.

Instead of long virtual meetings, schedule more one-on-one meetings and keep group meetings to no longer than 30 minutes.

Many years ago, recognizing the problem of their employees being “on the job” even when they were at home due to email, voice messaging and texts, Volkswagen started...

The Bed Bath and Beyond 20% off coupon is so ubiquitous that one of the mailers was even found by FBI agents in the junk drawer of notorious gangster, Whitey Bulger. 

Comedians and television shows make fun of the coupon and I’ve done a fair amount of my own ribbing of the brand. At peak circulation, over a billion coupons were mailed per year. Nearly everyone has seen one of these or has one in their stack of mail at home. Many consumers keep them in their cars and purses, waiting to use them.

But did you know? The brand started in 1971 as a single store in New Jersey, Bed ’n Bath, selling sheets and towels “at prices low enough that people didn’t have to wait around for a semiannual department store sale.” 

Founders, Leonard Feinstein and Warren Eisenberg didn’t want to operate their stores like everyone else. “We didn’t want to change prices and run sales. That’s a very costly way of doing business,” they...

In my work with clients abroad, I get to learn about all sorts of fun advertising regulations and standards. Because some of our client base is outside the U.S., I’ve been forced to learn quickly. In the United Kingdom, for example, they have the Advertising Standards Authority. It does nothing more than issue strongly-worded letters and seeing as how the British are so polite, even their strongly worded letters are quite nice, relatively speaking. Routinely, I have doctors telling me that I’m ruining the profession of audiology and that they find me repugnant. The British would never be so harsh. 

In an annual report, the UK’s ASA listed 755 complaints from consumers about a Kentucky Fried Chicken ad which features a chicken dancing to DMX’s “X Gon’ Give It To Ya.” It was the most complained about ad of 2017. Consumers said it was “disrespectful to chickens and distressing for vegetarians, vegans and...

If you observe the most productive and most successful people on the planet, you’ll notice three very important similarities in how they achieve results. It doesn’t matter if the person is an entrepreneur, doctor, lawyer, politician, religious leader, actor, teacher or any of a million different occupations. Those operating at the top 1-5% of their chosen field or profession have these three traits in common:

First, they are intentional. 

You’ve heard me say, “Nothing really great ever happens by accident.” Warren Buffett, Bob Iger when he led Disney, Tim Cook at Apple, Michael Jordan, Judd Apatow, Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook – these high achievers are intentional with their time, attention and energy.

In an interview with a gentleman who sold his business for $1.7 billion. He explained how he did this, when others in his field typically grow to $6 or 7 million, exactly the size of the business when it purchased it 20 years ago. His...

The first half of 2020 was one for the record books. We saw an entire decade’s worth of job gains vanish in two months. Then, about a third of the 21 million lost jobs came back. 

More than 1 in 7 U.S. workers lost their jobs during the economic shutdowns. Even though we’ve added jobs at a record pace in May and June, the unemployment rate remains at its highest level since the Great Depression.

In the U.S., the hardest-hit sectors were non-hospital health-care jobs, hotels and restaurants. These types of service industry jobs account for 70% of total U.S. employment. This covers the majority of my members here, who employ audiology and medical assistants.

I've long taught that you must have your ear to the ground in your individual market. Just like I watch the tourists arriving to Southern Utah from my home and pay close attention to the local news where thousands of local workers and families in my practice work, you must do the same.

My advice to clients in Las...

Today, when someone in Beijing gets the coronavirus again, the entire world knows about it within hours. 52 years after the Hong Kong flu, we still don’t know how many people actually died from it. The WHO says between 1 and 4 million people. That’s a pretty big range.

For the dad reading this on Father’s Day, imagine if someone asked you how many kids you have and you said, “somewhere between 1 and 4.” And yet, somehow we all accepted this final death toll from the Hong Kong flu back in 1968-1969 as somewhere between 1 and 4 million.

Why?

Because we weren’t obsessed with instant, always-on communication streaming to us 24/7 through our televisions and smartphones. In the 1950s our average radio use dropped to less than two hours per day while TV viewing climbed to 1 hour and 23 minutes. Back then, we consumed a limited amount of media and shrugged our shoulders at a wildly-inaccurate range of how many people died from the Hong Kong flu and we...

Angela Duckworth is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies grit and self-control. In her book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Professor Duckworth defines grit as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”

“In their work with The United States Military Academy at West Point, Duckworth and her team of psychologists have worked for years to understand who will make it through the rigorous training and who will drop out. For weeks on end, new recruits are asked, on an hourly basis, to do things they can’t yet do. Most cadets are tired, lonely, frustrated and ready to quit.

What’s interesting is that those who rise to the occasion and make it through the intense training are not the ones who have the most talent. Many drop out who have all the ability in the world. When presented with challenges that exceeded their current skills, what they lacked was...