Bud Taylor

South Korea is a great place. I've been working here for more than a year. The people are great and so is the economy. But everything comes at a cost. You have to ask whether Koreans are giving up too much freedom to be part of the ongoing Asian economic miracle.

Business needs the talents of people. Yet, the management of people is producing ever-decreasing results. Employees are more disaffected from their work than ever before in recent memory. To turn this around, those in Human Resources have to take a look at themselves and what they've been told to believe. Orthodoxies of employee commitment and pay for performance are anachronisms. We're in the Internet age. It's time we started to think about employment in that context.

The United States has gone through a wrenching debate over the reform of health care. The new bill cut to the essence of the United States as a republic and the sole of its citizens. This has been high stakes change management. What can the business world learn from this as a case study?

Only Tiger Woods has fallen farther and faster than Toyota. We have an unshakable belief in goals and metrics: "... what get's measured gets done." Yet Toyota followed all of the B-School advice and still failed. What went wrong? The goal, that's what! Toyota set its goal without regard to its customers. It believed more in its legacy of quality and durable products than it did in the loyalty of its customers. Taking customers out of goals leads to disaster.

The stock market might look good, but it is masking a resentment against our organizations. Customers are hostile and employees are disaffected. It's time to win them back. Leaders need to insist on "value for money" in products and services and they need to engage in the difficult business of building sustainable organizations based on: moral leadership, social responsibility, and commitment to employees.

We teach leaders to inspire others so they can achieve new visions. But what happens when leaders inspire and then abdicate? Or, when leaders inspire but don't provide resources and support? Leadership betrayal, that's what. Leadership betrayal has become a psychosis in today's hyper-active, multi-tasking business world. We have to learn how to identify it and deal with it. Leadership is a rare quality. It should never end in betrayal.

The Demise of Branch Banking Has Been Predicted for Several Decades. This Article Argues the Prematurity of This Prediction. branch Banking Hangs on for a Good Reason: We Want a Relationship With Those Who Handle our Money. Customer Loyalty Research Proves. the Basic Strategy to Get Value From our Branches is to Remove the "pain" From Transactional Processing; and Then Receive "gain" by Injecting Emotional Triggers Into the Customer Experience.