Category Archives: Perception

Stick It On RIGHT!!

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By Peter Jeff, Author
The Leadership Mints Series: Thinking, Loving and Speaking Like a Leader

Think of this ditty the next time you’re pinning a name tag on yourself before taking a seat at your next meeting.

Name Tag On the Right
Displayed in Plain Sight!

Pinning your name tag on the right makes it easier for the other person to read your name tag while shaking your hand and still maintaining relatively more eye contact with you.

(This is adapted from Mint 58 in
THINKING Like a Leader,
Featuring 77 Leadership Mints).

Nine out of 10 people are right-handed. When those right handers extend their right hand to shake someone’s hand Continue reading →

REWARD More Than AWARD

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Summond into the top editor’s office for the first time in years, the reporter’s blood pressure rose and his heart began beating a bit faster. He thought it could only be bad news. He must have screwed up. Or worse: he was getting fired.

Instead the editor reached into his desk before the reporter could sit down. The editor quickly tossed a small plastic bag toward the reporter who instinctively put up his right hand and snared it right out of the air. For a second, he thought it might be a bag of pot that someone planted in his desk.

But then he gripped the bag and to his sheer relief it was anything but soft and powdery. No this was hard and gleaming with a golden flair. Then suddenly the booming voice of the editor cut through the tension. “Here, I am supposed to give you that,” harrumphed the editor.

The reporter opened his right hand and found himself holding a 5-year-service pin for his five years of experience working for that newspaper. The reporter sighed in relief as the editor took a phone call and dismissed the reporter with a wave of his hand.

(This is an excerpt of a newly relaunched book titled
LOVING Like a Leader now available on Amazon.com

The young reporter left the editor’s office feeling more like Continue reading →

Quality Work: Shoot for the Moon

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to motivate quality behavior. Reading time 3:07.

She shimmered in the window. Her sleeky figure caught his eye instantly. Then she did something even he wasn’t quite prepared for. She dropped her pants and mooned him!

hula “Now I knew right then that I just had to have her,” the guy beamed. Oh how vulgar you say. How boorish! How crude and lude. What a A louse!

No not really. What a leader! Stay with me here.

He was eyeing a 12-inch hula doll shimmering in the window of a novelty store that he happened to pass. He went inside to investigate and learned that the doll came with with an air pump. You pump and she plumps her pants right down to her derrier – a “shoot-the-moon” demonstration that always seemed to turn heads, widen eyes and flare smiles. Continue reading →

Waking Your Hypnotized Chickens

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to focus on thoughtful decision-making. Reading time: 3:14

Imagine the power little Johnny had in his finger. He amazed the other kids on the farm who hadn’t yet learned the art of hypnotizing a chicken.

chicken1Little Johnny would first hold a chicken’s head down against the ground so the chicken would stare straight ahead on the ground. Then he would draw a line along the ground with a stick or a finger outward in front of the chicken.

The chicken would then freeze, trance-like for up to 30 minutes. It’s a biological defense mechanism the chicken has evolved to quickly play dead trance-like whenever it feels threatened. The suddenly “paralyzed” chicken then thwarts off predators very effectively.

Likewise control-oriented managers have learned how to paralyze an audience in a deep freeze like trance. With PowerPoint slides.

PowerPoint is in fact so numbing that the media relations officials in the Pentagon call it –Hypnotizing Chickens—when they show a series of boring and confusing PowerPoint slides for 25 minutes of a scheduled 30-minute news conference. That leaves only 5 minutes at the end for reporter’s questions “from anyone still awake,” notes Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel.

Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps has had to ward off more than his share of PowerPoint presiding -a.k.a. “hypnotizing chickens” antics via PowerPoint. No wonder he flatly states: “PowerPoint makes us stupid.” Continue reading →

Adapt To Be More Adept

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By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy
Here’s an idea to help you better adapt to new audiences. Reading time: 3:04

You’re beautiful and your sexy hair, stylish clothes and stunning makeup are just as beautiful. After all, you’re an actress with all the glamour that draws fans on stage and screen.

Audrey Meadows and Jackie Gleason

Audrey Meadows and Jackie Gleason

So what’s the chances that you would allow yourself to be professionally photographed while you’re wearing curlers, a torn housecoat and no makeup? Audrey Meadows did that and earned the contested TV role as the wife of Ralph Kramden in the Jackie Gleason’s sitcom The Honeymooners in 1955 .

And in the process, the famous actress of her time modeled a leadership behavior that the most influential leaders follow even today more than a half century later:

Adapt to your audience’s
fears, concerns
and expectations
before you make your presentation,
before you ask for the order or for the job.

Audry Meadows, the former Broadway musical star in Top Banana, had a method to her madness. She wanted the role of playing Jackie Gleason’s wife in the sitcom. But Gleason was reluctant to even consider her. Continue reading →