Crystal Key Ministries

How to Take a Month Off

Crystal Key Ministries — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:47:17 +0000

How to Take a Month Off 12:23 PM | Dorie Clark It’s an elusive dream twinkling in executives’ eyes: what if I could take an entire month off? The lure is obvious: the chance to truly unwind, to recharge your creativity, and to visit faraway places you can’t reach on a week-long jaunt. For many Americans, especially, it’s just not possible because of draconian vacation policies (my first job out of college gave me two weeks a year, which I had to “earn” over time, so I virtually couldn’t take any time off for an entire year). But for others — those with more generous employers, longtime employees who have saved up their days, or entrepreneurs calling their own shots — the hesitation is internal: What would happen to my business while I’m gone? Wouldn’t I alienate my clients? What if there’s an emergency? How can I afford to be gone that long? Those were my excuses, too, and the reason my longest vacation since the end of graduate school — well over a decade ago — had only lasted ten days. But last fall, I changed all that and spent a month traveling around India with my girlfriend. No question: my “mega break” entailed sacrifices and a lot of planning. But it also afforded me an opportunity few of my countrymen get to experience: seeing Mumbai firsthand, from its gilded corporate headquarters to its slums, and traveling throughout the less-visited southern part of the country. In fact, it was [...]

How to Turn an Obstacle into an Asset

Crystal Key Ministries — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:48:50 +0000

How to Turn an Obstacle into an Asset from HarvardBusiness.org by Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer, and Paul B. Brown A popular post on this site, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, provides a fabulous summary of what makes the difference between those who succeed and those who don’t. But, in our experience, it misses one really important “thing’: Successful people habitually turn obstacles into assets. People who succeed at work and in life believe and act as if “everything is a gift.” Well, maybe not every single thing imaginable. But assuming that everything is a gift is a good way of looking at the problems and surprises you’ll encounter in any endeavor, such as, for example, in getting a new venture off the ground, obtaining buy-in with your boss, or launching a new product line in an ultra-competitive market. Why should you react to a problem with gratitude, whether you are trying to start a business or create anything else? There are a number of reasons. First, you were going to find out eventually what people did and did not like about your idea. Better to learn it as soon as possible, before you sink more resources into the idea, venture or product line, etc. Second, the feedback could take you in another direction, or serve as a barrier to your competitors. You thought you wanted to open a restaurant, but a quick survey told you potential customers thought the area was saturated. But more than [...]

The Great Repeatable Leader

Crystal Key Ministries — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:47:26 +0000

The Great Repeatable Leader from HarvardBusiness.org by Chris Zook Admiral Lord Nelson, Britain’s famous naval leader, owed his enviable record of victories to the ability of his officers to make synchronized decisions in the heat of battle without communicating directly. These commanders, personally trained by Nelson, he called his “band of brothers” and they took the right decisions because they knew what he would do in their shoes. By projecting his key principles of decision making and his strategy out to the front line Nelson created a faster and more adaptable Royal Navy that regularly overwhelmed far larger enemies. Few businesses are like Nelson’s Navy. Rather than speeding up their decision-making, they’re slowing down. Of course, they’re doing it with the best of intentions. Here’s how it works. In an effort to cover all the bases in an uncertain, changing world companies are trying to give themselves as many strategic and organizational options as possible. In doing so, however, they are making themselves unconsciously more complex organizations. It is a trend that’s slowly and silently killing them. Complexity turns people inward and distorts information flow, slowing the pace of decision-making down and making the decisions themselves increasingly incoherent. How can leaders prevent this from happening? To find the answer to that question I attended a session on leadership at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It was led people by who have devoted their career to this topic and included Daniel Goleman, coiner of the term “emotional intelligence.” [...]

Faced with Distraction, We Need Willpower

Crystal Key Ministries — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:45:12 +0000

Faced with Distraction, We Need Willpower from HarvardBusiness.org by John Coleman Mustering willpower is a struggle for almost everyone — and it’s getting harder. We, as individuals and as a society, lack self-control at precisely the time we need it most. Willpower is about more than resisting our bad habits. It’s the mental discipline that allows us to cultivate good habits, make better decisions, and control our own behaviors — everything from dieting effectively to powering through difficult problems at work. It’s a quality that can separate the most productive businesspeople from the least productive. And it’s a trait that many of us lack. Surveys of more than 1 million people show that self-control is the character trait modern men and women recognize least in themselves. Our environment only exacerbates the problem. The jungle of stimuli that engulfs us each day make it difficult to exercise restraint or focus on the important habits we need to build or tasks we need to accomplish. Nicholas Carr has argued in his book, The Shallows, that the internet is destroying our ability to concentrate and read or think deeply; and as John Tierney and Roy Baumeister point out in their book, Willpower, a typical computer user checks out more than three dozen websites per day. Focusing on an important memo is hampered by the distraction of Facebook and the incessant new email notifications blinking on our smartphones. Our ability to read a book is handicapped by the impatience of our 140-character [...]

Stop Email Overload

Crystal Key Ministries — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:43:09 +0000

Stop Email Overload from HarvardBusiness.org by Amy Gallo Complaints about email abound. Perhaps you’ve heard some of these or uttered them in pain yourself: I receive hundreds of emails a day. I can spend my whole day responding to incoming messages. I can’t find anything in my inbox. In response, some companies are taking drastic steps to help workers manage the number of messages they receive. The CEO of Atos, a French IT services company, has vowed to ban internal email by 2013. Volkswagen in Germany has agreed to stop sending emails to certain employees after work hours. If these companies are taking radical action, is it time for you to do the same to counter your own overload? What the Experts Say Productivity experts counsel against such extreme measures. Email is certainly a threat to efficiency, says David Allen, a consultant and the author of Getting Things Done and Making It All Work, but he maintains that it’s also an essential work tool. “I’ve had email since 1983. I couldn’t live the life I live without it,” he says. Bob Pozen, a senior lecturer of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of “Extreme Productivity” agrees. Even if you wanted to use it less, he says, it’s nearly impossible to get people by phone or in person these days. Both Pozen and Allen believe that sweeping rules like the ones Atos and VW are trying are not necessary. You can regain control over your email, [...]

Tween Dating on the Rise

Crystal Key Ministries — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:53:01 +0000

Tween Dating on the Rise Monday, February 20, 2012 4:43 PM | Dennis Leap Dating is becoming common among younger and younger people. Parents are failing to step up and provide them the guidance they need to make wiser choices. A 2008 survey that nearly half of 11-to-14-year-olds say they have been in a dating relationship. The survey, cited by the Wall Street Journal, was taken of over a thousand teens by Tru, a Chicago youth market-research firm, for Liz Claiborne. You have to ask, why is a market research company asking teens and tweens questions about dating? Obviously to sell more products. Using survey results, advertisers blast adolescents with powerful ads of well-dressed teens and tweens in dating situations. Parents, the media is not your friend. The sole goal is to goad you into buying their products. The subliminal message blaring over the airwaves is that the best parents shower their kids with expensive cell phones, computers, designer clothes and gaming systems. Parents are not only pressured into buying clothes—they are pressured to let their adolescents date. Even more sinister communications coming from liberal sources spread a philosophy that undermines parental authority. Powerful media bombard parents with conflicting and confusing messages about how to parent. Parents are being pressured to be a friend—not a parent. These same media sources instruct children about how their parents should be parenting them. No wonder we have so much conflict and strife in families. An recent online poll on Yousphere, a social networking [...]

Uncovering the Origins of Mardi Gras and Other ‘Christian’ Festivals

Crystal Key Ministries — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:50:45 +0000

Uncovering the Origins of Mardi Gras and Other ‘Christian’ Festivals Monday, February 20, 2012 12:00 AM | Ron Fraser From Rio to Berlin, from Turin to Trinidad, from Cologne to New Orleans, crowds filled the city streets in the annual bacchanal that precedes the Catholic holiday known as Ash Wednesday. Increasingly, these celebrations are being taken on by the British and American people as annual celebrations in a vein once foreign to the English-speaking peoples. What does all this annual expression of unbridled hedonism have to do with the practice of pure religion? Well, to understand that, we need to go back in history to the beginning of religion as recorded in both secular and biblical history. The common view is that Carnival, or Mardi Gras, is, at its origin, a Christian festival that precedes the season of Lent, itself also assumed to be of Christian origin. Carnival traditionally has been seen as the last opportunity to let off steam and indulge the flesh before the denial that is supposed to accompany Lent, the 40-day period that precedes Easter, another annual festival that is assumed to have Christian origins. But what are the facts? We assume so much as we grow up, acculturated into an already established society that educates us into the common view of the day. Too often we accept the customs and practices of our parents—and their parents, as well as the generations that preceded them—without question. Yet honest seekers of truth will be led at some [...]

Why Character Matters

Crystal Key Ministries — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:38:58 +0000

Why Character Matters 12:00 AM|Stephen Flurry In 1787, several of the greatest minds America has ever produced gathered in Philadelphia for what became known as the Constitutional Convention. Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris, all there to write a Constitution, knew they were sailing in uncharted waters—embarking on a bold new plan to establish a federal government for the purpose of unifying the colonies under one nation. After the Constitution became supreme law in the U.S. on March 4, 1789, America quickly ascended to astonishing heights—becoming the most powerful and dominant nation this world has ever known. But to what extent can that awesome development and growth be attributed to America’s humble beginning? As far as human government goes, the United States started about as right as any government man has ever produced. Critics today can say what they will about why it started right. But the Founding Fathers all seemed to be in perfect agreement on one important cornerstone—that the nation would survive and prosper only if it was founded upon religion and morality. George Washington firmly believed that high morals and sincere religion had to be the fundamental building blocks of American society—if it was to succeed and prosper. In his First Inaugural Address on April 30, 1789, President Washington said, “The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality.” For Washington, what Americans did in the privacy of their own homes was not [...]

Why It’s Wrong to Inject Contraceptives Into Students Without Parental Consent

Crystal Key Ministries — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:42:21 +0000

Why It’s Wrong to Inject Contraceptives Into Students Without Parental Consent Tuesday, February 14, 2012 12:00 AM | Robert Morley If your 13-year-old daughter was having sex, would you want to know about it? Would you need to know about it? How angry would you be to find out that school officials knew she was having sex with boys and they withheld that knowledge from you? What about if a federal law actually banned teachers and administrators from notifying you? How much more angry would you be to find out that school “health” officials implanted chemical-releasing contraceptives beneath your 13-year-old’s skin so that she could have sex without having to worry about pregnancy, and again, no one told you? If there wasn’t something fundamentally wrong with their minds, most parents would be furious. Yet this is exactly what is happening in Britain, according to the Daily Mail. Last year, 1,700 13- and 14-year-old girls were given subdermal implants and 800 were given hormone injections to temporarily prevent pregnancy. Another 3,200 15-year-olds were also implanted with hormone-releasing contraceptives. But prevailing “patient confidentiality” laws strictly forbid school authorities seeking permission from or even notifying parents. Are we out of our minds? Parents are raising teens who are growing up in an increasingly sex-crazed and depraved environment. Then politicians step in and take away the most fundamental parental tool, knowing the truth, at a frightening juncture in their child’s life! Forget about teaching children to have the morality and character to lead a [...]

What’s in Your Ear?

Crystal Key Ministries — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:38:11 +0000

What’s in Your Ear? Monday, February 13, 2012 12:00 AM | Ron Fraser The folly of youth is to think you know everything. It takes a degree of humility to admit that you don’t know it all. To the thinking person, maturity brings with it, over time, the realization of just how little we do know. Yet youth, in its blissful ignorance, can be hard to convince of this—especially when it comes to what they stick in their ear. The current generation is subject to the massive bombardment of certain sounds—which they insist on calling music—the sale of which is designed by certain folks to enhance their own private coffers with no mind to any detrimental effect on the young listener. This the young are far too often plugged into for many hours of the day. Whereas video, the visual stimulant to which youth is most attached, relieves the mind of the thinking process almost entirely, audio engages the mind. Mind you, not much effort is required to listen to today’s pop music. The lack of complexity is remarkable in its often sheer monotony of repetitious beat, banal lyrics, a tonality which often reaches across a huge span of about half an octave, and talentless voicing. The result is like the continuing dripping of water on a stone—it may be mind-numbing, but over time it cuts deep into the mind and leaves a negative impression that lasts a lifetime. It exerts massive influence on social behavior. This cannot be good. [...]