Recent Articles from Pat Wiesner
This is the greatest gift you can give someone
Consider this: If you could just give one characteristic to a youngster, what would it be? Based on your experience, what would be the most helpful personality trait to be injected with, if all it took was a shot?
How leaders can be better at their job
A young woman appointed as a manager for the first time recently asked me what I thought was the most important thing for leaders to think about while trying to be better at their jobs.
How John Elway made my day
I had flown this airplane into this airport literally hundreds of times, and I checked everything. Nothing could go wrong. And it didn’t. The landing was almost perfect. And that would have been the end of it, except for what John Elway said then.
Here's to the awesome power of goal-setting
This experience has affected us in a profound way. It has us doing all sorts of things I thought we couldn’t do anymore.
Times, they are a changin’…
Uber vehicles are way cleaner and roomier than an average New York taxi; the drivers are nicely dressed, polite and knowledgeable.
Some thoughts on management
My advice to managers: Everybody is scrambling for recognition. Take this stuff out of the equation by making it the same for all at the same level. Treat everyone the way they deserve to be treated.
Taking down the office walls
A long time ago I had just been promoted to “upper management” and was feeling on top of the world, but I was trying to play it very cool. During the first management meeting, one of the topics covered was our move into new offices. My new boss, the CEO, asked me how I felt about office size — whe...
Do it like Tito Puente
I think Puente was pleased. Why? Because he seemed to understand that a leader’s job is not to be better than everyone on the team, but to bring out the best in each team member and thus make each successful. He is good enough to have the top spot in any salsa band, but if he couldn’t build a team...
Where do the really good people go to work?
Sometime in the early nineties, we decided that we were causing some of our own problems because we weren’t training our own salesmen. Business was good and growing, but we wanted to make our team better. So for 10 or so years we ran classes and asked everyone who attended to rank, in order of […]
Rough road for the children of Central America
In 1998, Hurricane Mitch clobbered Honduras. With more than 15 hours of winds in excess of 155 knots, Mitch ripped through the middle of the country, destroying almost 80 percent of the bridges and roads. Hundreds of thousands of homes were destroyed. The death toll was estimated somewhere around 11,000, but the real number will […]
The best advice I ever received came from a former boss
With college and a little bit of grad school behind me, I struck out in 1958 to “seek my fortune,” as they say. I had a degree in physics but I didn’t want to spend my days in a lab, so I figured being a sales engineer would be a happy medium. The best salesmen […]
Dr. Oz and a happy company
My wife often watches Dr. Oz on the kitchen TV, so, like it or not, I end up listening to him, too. Even though I would probably deny being a “fan,” I have to admit that he is a very interesting fellow in the way he approaches health from the “you are what you eat” […]