BRIGANTINE MEDIA

IT'S ABOUT TIME YOU FOUND 5 EXTRA HOURS EACH WEEK, DON'T YOU THINK?

It’s About Time is Harold C. Lloyd’s newest book, designed to help everyone in business find more time by managing time better. Lloyd is convinced that most people waste time at work through poor time management. “When you learn to manage your schedule using the techniques in the book,” says Lloyd, “it’s as if you’ve found five extra hours each week.”

It’s About Time recommends that businesspeople start and end each day with a “Disappearing Act” to help organize their work. The book offers ways to ZAP! the distractions that waste time on the job. You’ll learn how to create and follow To-Do Today lists that really keep you on schedule.

But the biggest surprises in It’s About Time are tips on how to use everyday management tasks to free up more time at work. The book shows how businesspeople can improve delegating skills, run meetings more effectively, and even recruit and hire staff better to maximize time management and take control of their time at work. “We waste time with the tasks we do every day,” says Lloyd. “In It’s About Time, you’ll learn how to use those tasks to help you manage your time, not lose it.”

Read It’s About Time, and have everyone you work with read it, too. Then enjoy the extra time you’ll have each week. Let us know what you do with your five extra hours!

Click here to order your copy.

Click here to find out more about author Harold Lloyd, or here to see video clips from a recent seminar.

WHY DENIAL IS LIKE FISHING FOR SHARKS

Excerpt from "The Big Picture: Essential Business Lessons from the Movies," by Kevin Coupe and Michael Sansolo

Jaws is one of the best thrillers ever made, but it also serves up an example of business behavior that is almost inevitably fatal: denial.

“I don’t think either one of you are aware of our problems,” Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) says to Chief of Police Martin Brody (Roy
Scheider) and Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) at one point in the movie. “I’m only trying to say that Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars. Now, if the people can’t swim here, they’ll be glad to swim at the beaches of Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Long Island...”

Sure, Amity needed summer dollars. But what Vaughn ignored was the fact that the town also needed tourists who weren’t worried about being torn limb from limb.
Vaughn’s reluctance to close the beach is an example of the type of short-term thinking that should be avoided in the business world.

Vaughn is working under the premise that if the town of Amity closes the beaches because of concerns about shark attacks, it will scare away the tourists on which the town depends. Which is true. But Vaughn ignores the cold reality that if tourists find out that there is a shark in the water and the town allowed people to go swimming, not only will they stay away in droves, they’ll also lose trust in the town’s management and never come back.

Businesses have to engender trust in their customers. Violate that sense of trust by ignoring the obvious facts—or even just the likely trends—and the repercussions can be both serious and long lasting.

Mayor Vaughn obviously never learned from the management at Johnson & Johnson, who, when faced with evidence that Tylenol had been tampered with in 1982, immediately pulled the product off the shelves. The Tylenol executives figured that they could survive the short-term hit, but would never survive the backlash if they denied the seriousness of the problem. When a new tamper-proof version of Tylenol came back to store shelves, there remained a sense of trust on the part of the consumers because Johnson & Johnson played it straight.

To be fair, although Mayor Vaughn generally is painted as the bad guy in Jaws because he ignores the sharp-toothed reality swimming just off shore, almost everybody is in some sort of denial. While this denial drives the plot forward, it also offers a primer on how to not deal with serious or even not-so-serious business situations.
Think about it. Quint, the great shark hunter played to crusty perfection by Robert Shaw, continues to chase the enormous great white shark with a small boat and just two crewmen. That’s worldclass denial.

Hooper, the oceanic expert with a passion for sharks, shows a sense of denial several times when he gets into the water with the shark. Sure, he’s getting into an anti-shark cage, but the evidence is pretty strong that it isn’t going to be nearly “anti” enough.

“You go inside the cage”? Quint asks. “Cage goes in the water, you go in the water. Shark’s in the water. Our shark.” And then he sings: “Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies. Farewell and adieu, you ladies of Spain. For we’ve received orders for to sail back to Boston. And so nevermore shall we see you again.”

About the only main character who doesn’t seem to be in denial is Chief Brody, and even he has a moment of self-delusion when he’s asked why, if he is scared of the water, he lives on an island. “It’s only an island when you look at it from the water,” he says.

Yeah, right.

But it also is Brody who has the movie’s primal moment of clarity. It’s when he’s shoveling bait into the water and gets his first close-up look at the shark’s massive body, black eyes, and very, very sharp teeth.

“I think we’re going to need a bigger boat,” he says.

Truer words never have been spoken.

In business, as in Jaws, denial can get you eaten for lunch.

Click here for more information

Do not use the words “up to” — as in “up to 40 percent off.” The customer will immediately assume that almost everything is 10 percent off — or lower. — Murray Raphel, author of “Selling Rules!”
Read More Here

Jan. 20, 2010

Official launch date of Brigantine Media website. Call 802-751-8802 for more information.

Jan. 15, 2010

Bookstore publication date of “The Big Picture: Essential Business Lessons from the Movies,” by Kevin Coupe and Michael Sansolo. Call 802-751-8802 for more information.