Archives by: Ray Beerhorst
Book Announcement: Growing Leaders with Sterling Integrators
We are pleased to announce that Growing Leaders with Sterling Integrators by Ray Beerhorst is now available in paperback and on Amazon Kindle.
The book comes out of Ray's experience as an Executive Coach, and it sets out to explain two things: how leaders can achieve personal growth, and how they can transform their organizations.
It includes helpful charts and diagrams along with a step-by-step plan for gaining the qualities that make for effective leadership.
Here is the link. Start changing the way you ...
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Check out the new Sterling Integrators video!
We're very proud to release our new video that lays out our leadership philosophy. Our hats are off to Axoneme Studios, who created all of the video's animations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXlZktUh7UY
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Measuring Progress
People buy invisible things all the time. To prove this, one has only to note the billions of dollars spent each year on education and legal advice. Still, the buyers of intangibles don’t make those purchasing decisions quickly or lightly, and rightfully so. The merits of a car can be judged almost immediately, but the value of an opinion or knowledge may take months or years to be known, and by then, the person who sold it may be long gone.
The ...
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Everyone Is a Salesperson
Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, is one of the reasons I never considered a career in sales. The image of the burned out main character, Willy Loman, wearily stumbling through a door carrying an enormous suitcase in each hand was enough to convince me that sales was often brutal and thankless work.
But Dan Pink, in his book To Sell Is Human, makes a compelling case that we are all already in sales. He explains, “When I sat down to ...
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Trust Your Instincts
Michelle was a phenomenal salesperson, so it seemed only logical to promote her to the Director of Sales position. But just three months later the whole department is in disarray and sales are down 15%.
Michelle knows sales. She has great emotional intelligence. But she’s not performing well in her new role.
What’s going on here? (more…)
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Blood, Bile, and Phlegm?: Understanding Our Personalities
Some History…
If you were a talkative person with a sunny disposition living in Greece around the year 300 BC, your friends would have described you as “sanguine,” meaning that you have “extra blood.” Blood was one of four different bodily fluids—or, humors as they called them—that the ancients believed influenced an individual’s personality. The other three were yellow bile (choleric), phlegm (phlegmatic), and black bile (melancholic). An excess of black bile would make you melancholy. A deficiency of yellow bile explained ...
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Why Carrots and Sticks Fail
Most likely, your intuitions about how to motivate people are dead wrong.
Mine were too, before I read Drive by Daniel Pink. Pink makes an extremely compelling case for why it is time to put down our carrots and sticks and leave them behind in the 20th century were they belong. How he arrived at that conclusion is fascinating as well, because it had nothing to do with touchy-feely ideas or a socialist agenda, but rather with cold, hard empirical facts.
The Federal Reserve ...
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Changing Our Ways
Change isn’t easy, and science sheds some light on why that is. When we repeatedly think or behave in a certain way, permanent connections in our brains begin to form. Over time these connections become deeply engrained neural pathways. By having these connections “hardcoded” into your brain, you avoid having to form new connections every time you repeat a thought or action. The connection is already there waiting to transmit a signal.
Most of the time, that’s a good thing because those ...
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Leaders and Scapegoats
Every once in a great while, a unique thinker develops a theory that can completely change the way we see the world. Like a lens, the theory brings new things into view where once we saw only chaos.
Such theories can enable us to change our world – for the better or for worse. Take Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example. It began simply as one man’s hypothesis of reality. But before the century was out it had changed the world in two very different ...
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“Rosebud”
For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
No one sets out to lose what was once most important to them. But it still happens. For those in leadership roles, the subtle influence of money and power can take over, often with tragic results.
Citizen Kane, the classic Orson Welles film released in 1941, depicts the pernicious and corrosive effects that money and power can have on those who encounter them unprepared. ...
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