Performance And Motivation In McDonalds
People are the most important resources of an organization. They ensure the interaction of financial, industrial, and other resources so that the organization can function. Nowadays experienced managers realize that he financial reward cannot stay the only kind of an employee encouragement. The employees’ needs should be viewed as an entity that leads to the search of non financial motives. There exist many non financial motives that are connected with the employee’s satisfaction of needs, such as his/her recognition, participation in the decision-making, self-fulfillment, personal growth and others.The practice shows that the full use of human resources of an organisation is one of the most significant advantages, which allow companies to occupy the leading positions in the world market. The ‘McDonalds’ company flourishes owing to the logical integration of the staff into the problem solving. The company adheres to the principle: ‘The result is done by a man’. ‘McDonalds’ examines its employees as the primary source of progress in the fie

Features are not Benefits
People don’t buy features; they buy the promise of what those features can do for them. Features are meaningless. Benefits are what sell your products or services.Perhaps you’re rolling your eyes as you read this because this is such an obvious point. You didn’t get to where you are today by not knowing the difference between your products’ features and benefits.Of course you didn’t, but a funny thing happens when a person is put in charge of their company’s advertising. They often tend to forget that features are not benefits. They forget that nobody cares about their product’s features except the product designers and some salespeople.Now maybe you’re different than most people. Maybe your company’s ads are all about the benefits of your products. Go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back. You’ve achieved the goal of this step and may move on to the next.But, if your ad is filled with bullet points describing all the wonderful features of your products, take a moment and read on.Say you own a company that

How Can You Be Innovative?
A couple of months ago I went along to something called an Innovation Partnership. I was quite excited about it - I'm a great believer in trying new ways of doing things, opportunities for thinking outside the box and a chance to discuss ideas with new people. This had all the ingredients of a useful and stimulating few hours. In reality, it was simply a networking opportunity for mostly statutory funded enterprise agencies. Not very innovative at all. Such groupings just seem to be called partnerships, in the same way that in the 20th Century they were called committees. I can't help but remember that a camel is a horse designed by a committee! I think that is a topic for a future posting however.One good thing that came from it was meeting up with Suzy Rogers of the Women in Education Network - she is someone I met many years ago when I helped her organisation to successfully apply for Lottery funding. Suzy invited me to speak to her organisation at one of their dinners and this I did a couple of weeks ago.Back to innovation...sentation should be like a brick and the presentation itself should be like wrapping it in velvet. Bricks are simple, easy to pick up, usable on their own but more usable with other bricks. They’re easy to grasp and everything about them is immediately obvious.

They’ve got a reasonable amount of ’stopping power’ too.

On the downside, they’re likely to scrape your skin if you’re not used to handling them and they’re just that little bit too uncomfortable for most people, so wrapping them in velvet makes them more user-friendly for your audience. Velvet is smooth, subtle and covers over the rough edges – that means that more people are more likely to pick the brick up.

To be blunt for a moment, no matter how good your brick might be, if the velvet isn’t up to it, no one will pick it up. (To be fair I should add that if all you’ve got is velvet with no brick inside it people will spot that as soon as they try and pick it up, too: you need both, obviously!)

This article isn’t about the brick: it can’t be. You know your subject matter; you’re the experts. I’m not.

But how important is the velvet, then? Well, Richard Burton managed to make reading the telephone directory sound interesting, but on the other hand, Bill Gates manages to make the future of technology sound slightly less interesting than my O-level lessons in Archeology! Believe me, that takes some doing.

Applying the analogy

So how does this rather twee-sounding analogy help in practice? Let’s start at the beginning by looking at how long you’re going to speak for and use that as an example.

Actually, I want to be slightly more off-beat than that. It’s not about length measured in minutes: only bureaucrats measure time that way. Real people like you, me and your audience measure time by how long it feels to them; if they’re engaged and interested you can talk for longer than if your audience is bored.

The velvet brick approach is that you consider the two elements of the presentation separately. First you think of what you want to say – your brick – and then you think about how you’re going to say it – your velvet.

Using the approach, clearly you should present for as long as it takes to tell people about your subject: no more, no less. If you can do it in five minutes, do so. If you need 20 either negotiate a 20 minutes slot or talk about something else. You can no more “fit a quart into a pint pot” (as we say in the UK) than you can give your audience all they need to know about particle physics in 15 minutes.

On the other hand only

ore likely to pick the brick up.

To be blunt for a moment, no matter how good your brick might be, if the velvet isn’t up to it, no one will pick it up. (To be fair I should add that if all you’ve got is velvet with no brick inside it people will spot that as soon as they try and pick it up, too: you need both, obviously!)

This article isn’t about the brick: it can’t be. You know your subject matter; you’re the experts. I’m not.

But how important is the velvet, then? Well, Richard Burton managed to make reading the telephone directory sound interesting, but on the other hand, Bill Gates manages to make the future of technology sound slightly less interesting than my O-level lessons in Archeology! Believe me, that takes some doing.

Applying the analogy

So how does this rather twee-sounding analogy help in practice? Let’s start at the beginning by looking at how long you’re going to speak for and use that as an example.

Actually, I want to be slightly more off-beat than that. It’s not about length measured in minutes: only bureaucrats measure time that way. Real people like you, me and your audience measure time by how long it feels to them; if they’re engaged and interested you can talk for longer than if your audience is bored.

The velvet brick approach is that you consider the two elements of the presentation separately. First you think of what you want to say – your brick – and then you think about how you’re going to say it – your velvet.

Using the approach, clearly you should present for as long as it takes to tell people about your subject: no more, no less. If you can do it in five minutes, do so. If you need 20 either negotiate a 20 minutes slot or talk about something else. You can no more “fit a quart into a pint pot” (as we say in the UK) than you can give your audience all they need to know about particle physics in 15 minutes.

On the other hand only

und slightly less interesting than my O-level lessons in Archeology! Believe me, that takes some doing.

Applying the analogy

So how does this rather twee-sounding analogy help in practice? Let’s start at the beginning by looking at how long you’re going to speak for and use that as an example.

Actually, I want to be slightly more off-beat than that. It’s not about length measured in minutes: only bureaucrats measure time that way. Real people like you, me and your audience measure time by how long it feels to them; if they’re engaged and interested you can talk for longer than if your audience is bored.

The velvet brick approach is that you consider the two elements of the presentation separately. First you think of what you want to say – your brick – and then you think about how you’re going to say it – your velvet.

Using the approach, clearly you should present for as long as it takes to tell people about your subject: no more, no less. If you can do it in five minutes, do so. If you need 20 either negotiate a 20 minutes slot or talk about something else. You can no more “fit a quart into a pint pot” (as we say in the UK) than you can give your audience all they need to know about particle physics in 15 minutes.

On the other hand only

velvet brick approach is that you consider the two elements of the presentation separately. First you think of what you want to say – your brick – and then you think about how you’re going to say it – your velvet.

Using the approach, clearly you should present for as long as it takes to tell people about your subject: no more, no less. If you can do it in five minutes, do so. If you need 20 either negotiate a 20 minutes slot or talk about something else. You can no more “fit a quart into a pint pot” (as we say in the UK) than you can give your audience all they need to know about particle physics in 15 minutes.

On the other hand only a presentation genius could make a presentation about how quickly paint dries interesting to the general public for more than a few minutes. (There are such people but they’re depressingly few and far between, believe me!)

Look at the other option – that you can explain things in five minutes but you’ve got 20. Listen to Pascal: “I am sorry for the length of my letter, but I had not the time to write a short one.” No one ever made themselves unpopular by finishing early. When you’ve finished saying what you’ve got to say, shut up. If 30% of your presentation is waffle your audience will assume that 30% of your claims about your product are waffle…..

… worse in fact, because once they get past their ‘boredom threshold’ they’ll simply switch off and take nothing you say on board.

So, moving on, let’s look at how this philosophy works for the actual style of your presentation. Are we talking about something complex or something simple? If it’s complex, does that complexity stem from the concept you’re trying to get over or from the application of that concept, the details etc. That gives us three options, and none of them require PowerPoint (or “Presenter” or “Impress” or any of the other presentation packages out there) – at least not automatically. The velvet brick approach is to look at the content and then decide what format of presentation to use.

If you’re like many people you’ll tend to sub-consciously put the idea of the presentation together with the idea of a PowerPoint-type presentation (an example of a phenomenon we call ‘Communication Impotence’, but that’s for another article!). Resist the urge! Don’t even go near a computer to write your presentation until you know exactly what you’re going to say and even then only if you’ve consciously decided that a computer presentation is the way to go.

If you need to, give your presentation the Fuse Test. If all the fuses in the building blew, could you still explain your concept? Anyone saying “yes” should consider long and hard whether they should be using a computer-based presentation in the first place. (Anyone saying “No” should just spend 10 seconds checking that they’re the right person for the job! :) ) Computer-based presentations are actually a lot harder to write well than people think and if your velvet is alienating you drastically cut your chances of your audience actually picking up your brick which is, presumably, what you were hoping for when you agreed to speak!

A third example

You know how long you’re going to speak for and you know whether you’r