Mediocrity or Excellence - The Choice is Yours     If you look back on what your business has accomplished over the years, truth be told, you can most likely apply the Pareto Principle to the arc of your business success. As many of us know, the Pareto Principle states that 20% of the efforts, resources, attention, activity, customers, or products, will account for 80% of the results. The theory first postulated by an Italian mathematician has been thoroughly studied and shown to hold true time and time again.   The 80/20 ratio will vary from person to person, company to company, sometimes being as...

Disprite Omicron, U.S. Economy Continues to Grow     Triple the number expected - what happened?   As reported by the Washington Post, "In addition to the robust January, the Labor Department also more than doubled its tabulations of jobs gains for November and December. The U.S. economy added 647,000 in November, not the 249,000 the agency had earlier estimated. And the economy added 510,000 jobs in December, the Labor Department said, not the 199,000 initially forecast. That means there were some 700,000 more jobs added at the end of last year than previously estimated, with employers working aggressively to draw in workers across a...

2022 Economic Predictions     How we got here The best way to answer this first question is to describe what we mean by here? The whole world was anxious to get out of 2020. What we didn't know that 2021 wasn't going to turn out much better. For a few brief, shining weeks in mid-summer, we thought we had finally emerged from the shadow of pandemic into the sunshine of normalcy. It turned out to be nothing more than wishful thinking. Who knew we needed to squeeze a year's worth of fun into two weeks in July?   Despite Delta and Omicron, the U.S. economy...

Job Descriptions Can Be Causing You to Miss Out on the Best Employees   Are you sure that’s the job description you want to go with? Inevitably, job descriptions focus on the specifics of what exact skills, education, and experience are obvious requirements for the position. All others need not apply.   In fact, resume processing algorithms are keyed to spot the specific words that indicate a candidate may be suitable. If all or most of the key words are there, their resume might make it through the sorting hat. If too few are seen, the candidate never even gets a first look.   The purpose...

ASN will be closed Monday, January 17, 2022, in support of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day mission of service.     Did you know that in 1994, Congress passed the King Holiday and Service Act, which transformed Martin Luther King Jr. Day into a day dedicated to volunteer service in honor of Dr. King's legacy?     We would like to inspire you to serve your community during this leg of the pandemic. Be safe, get vaccinated, wear a mask, and practice social distancing. These are ways we can all serve our local community; stay well and reduce the stress on our healthcare workers. Thank you.