How To Be A Career Time Traveler
You might be asked to articulate your career journey when seeking a new job or you may be exploring a new direction. It can be difficult picking out the significant and relevant moments, whether you have been employed in many jobs or only a few. You may feel positive...
Military Educational Funding and How to Find It
Are you in the military or about to leave it? Have you given any thought to your educational opportunities? It’s all about funding, isn’t it? No matter if you’re active duty, a reservist, or a discharged or retired veteran, funding an education can be the roughest...
Make Your Employees Happy (Without Giving Raises)
Millennials are changing the way workplaces approach company culture. As the first generation to grow up with the Internet, Millennials’ mobile lifestyles don’t understand the daily 9-to-5 grind. This year Millennials account for the highest percentage of the...
How to Become a Homicide Detective
Cops—even homicide detectives—sometimes get a bad rap. They can be accused of abuse of power, corruption, false witness, violence, racism, you name it. Never has this been brought into clearer focus than on the one-year anniversary of the protests that erupted in...
Introverts and Extroverts In Government Collaborate For Results
John, an introvert, and Quinn, an extrovert, were training managers at a regional government agency. The employees in their office needed help with creating viable learning plans. Unfortunately, John and Quinn were overwhelmed with requests for coaching and needed to...
Public Sector Leadership and Coaching Basketball
If you’ve read any of my blog entries for The Persimmon Group (TPG), you know that I’m a hardcore Dallas Mavericks fan, a true blue MFFL (Mavs Fan For Life). Tulsa is my adopted home, though, and much of my work at TPG is in Oklahoma City, so I throw some of my...
Government Roads are Paved with Good Intentions
Most people are aware the road to hell is paved with good intentions; and so it is with most government roads; the policies, programs and regulations governments approve. Most government roads have noble intentions but they too produce unintended consequences? For...
Education: Moving Sideways and Up
By Dr. Oliver Hedgepeth, Program Director, Government Contracts and Acquisition at American Public University When I worked for the US government, I was hired as a GS-7 and received several early promotions with predictable succession. Then the promotions stopped. So,...
Hawaii: First in Progressive Health Care
It isn’t just access to all the sun and surf in the state of Hawaii, which marks the 56th Anniversary of its statehood this month, that makes its citizens so healthy. Hawaii proves that universal access to healthcare can have a tremendous impact on the quality of...
Information Governance: Information Assets
When I started this series, I explained that the focus of an Information Governance program can be broken down into four basic components: What are your information assets? Where are they located? When can you dispose of them? Who manages them and has access to them?...
City Branding: Does Your Welcome Wagon Have a Flat Tire?
How does your city welcome new business? Does your welcome wagon have a flat tire? When I think of a community's "brand," I do not think of the taglines or marketing slogans that mayors and economic development directors mention in speeches or marketing materials. I...
How Nonprofit Organizations Benefit Local Government
Nonprofits are vital institutions and can have profound effects on individuals, communities, and governments. These organizations can be attributed with improving our economic conditions, working with government leaders, and advancing public policy initiatives. A...
The Shale Boom and You
The energy renaissance is a common label awarded to the nation’s recent increased productivity of shale oil and gas. The costs and benefits of this upturn pose numerous implications, which affect not only the energy industry, but consequently local government,...
Tea, Tax and a Revolution
We recently celebrated the 4th of July and I couldn’t help but think back to my years in local government where I learned Americans disliked paying taxes - any kind of taxes - Federal, State and Local – but especially local property taxes and that so many candidates...
Life as a State Social Work Contractor
State agencies of every order use their power and budgets to contract others to do their work. These budgets shrink considerably when they are used for services like behavioral healthcare for children. In the case of adult services, the struggle as a state contractor...
Being Radical in a Leadership Role
Like many others, I have read and appreciated the insights of Steve Farber’s The Radical LEAP, and seen in many instances the various ways in which love, energy, audacity and power have been key ingredients in the advancing successes of our organizations. And like...
God Bless America!
America, to the outsider, can be many different things. A Superpower, the Land of Hope and Glory, the most advanced nation on earth, the capital of the world for, among other things, film and entertainment, space exploration, global business and information...
Information Governance Insights: It’s All About the Metrics
Organizations run on metrics. In the previous article we discussed measuring your Information Governance program against the ARMA International Generally Accepted Records Keeping Principles® using their NextLevel™ assessment tool. This gives you a baseline score of...