This month my company featured me on our portal in a blog-style interview. I thought I’d share since I haven’t posted much about work lately. Here you go: Get to Know John Demma We […]
Get to Know Me, From My Company’s Portal Blog
Gut Check – Getting Back Up
This barber, he had to be seventy, was telling me once while trimming me up how he just had a whole bunch of cancer surgically removed about a week earlier. Tough old dog, I […]
Profit and Loss: My definition of a business and the role of leaders
“Business” is just a made up word for a group of people who decide to work together towards a common goal that they feel will help them achieve their own personal goals. […]
Born Lucky: Playing Warren Buffett’s Ovarian Lottery
Warren Buffett says he was born lucky. Being born in America, in the 1930s, without having to overcome barriers of race or gender, combined with the power of compound interest, allowed Buffett […]
Management Skills: Praise and Positive Feedback
The other day I read this Wall Street Journal article called “Smarter Ways to Discipline Children.” The article advocates the parent management strategy outlined by Dr. Alan E. Kazdin in his famous […]
Having Kids Won’t Kill Your Career, But Seeking Work/Life Balance Might
Kids are generally thought of as little career killers for their parents. I can understand why. Kids take up a lot of a parent’s time with their need for attention and supervision, […]
The Top 10 Tips For Being A Great Manager (Not Really)
The other day a new guy asked me, “Can you give me some tips?” I think he wanted me to give him one of those top ten lists, you know, the ten […]
Screen Addiction
I read this Newsweek article called “Is the Internet Making Us Crazy” last week. It’s about how people are becoming more addicted to the web, digital devices, and screens in general. I am […]
Entropy Always Increases – The second law of thermodynamics applied to business management
Why do we experience time in one direction? In other words, why do we remember the past, and know nothing about the future? And why is it a complete certainty that my company and your company will some day go out of business?
Of Personal Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent
How did I get to where I am now? To what extent can I plan the future of my career, or my life? These are some questions I asked myself this week […]
Results (Money) Are The Only Thing That Matters
When I was twenty-one I landed my first real management job as a restaurant manager at a Marriott. And when I first started this job, our food and beverage department was performing […]
Time
My time is beginning to pass faster. I barely noticed it. The other day Kelly and I were looking at some pictures from when we first met, and, boy, I looked a […]
Going All In
In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, my grandfather Nick Demma ran a restaurant with his brothers called The Boat. During this time, when my grandfather was between thirty and sixty years old, […]
Demma’s Employee Engagement Curve: How managers can fight performance atrophy
I have a hypothesis that most employees naturally follow the below engagement curve. Without intervention from management, employees who begin in an enthusiastic honeymoon stage eventually slide into negative contribution and finally […]
When The Monster Stops Growing, It Dies
I am lucky to work for a growth company. We also happen to be the industry leader, by a huge margin, but this doesn’t stop us from aggressively pursuing more growth. In […]