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 all share common goals, but rarely do we have an opportunity to share a cup of coffee and break the ice. Yet, studies show … Continue reading Get to Know Me, From My Company’s Portal Blog
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 thought. "I can't believe you're back to work already." "You ever been in a fight before?" he asked. I nodded. "Then you know … Continue reading Gut Check – Getting Back Up
"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. This collective pursuit is only possible if the common goal of this group produces some product or service that meets the collective and … Continue reading Profit and Loss: My definition of a business and the role of leaders
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 to amass one of the greatest personal fortunes in the history of mankind (which will be almost entirely given to philanthropy). As Buffett … Continue reading Born Lucky: Playing Warren Buffett’s Ovarian Lottery
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 book The Kazdin Method. Basically the doctors and researchers discussed in the article have found that the only effective way to get desirable … Continue reading Management Skills: Praise and Positive Feedback
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, and time is a manager's most valuable and scarcest resource. Kids can also be unpredictable and cause their mom or dad to miss … Continue reading Having Kids Won’t Kill Your Career, But Seeking Work/Life Balance Might
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 simple things you need to do to be a great manager. There is such a thing as a stupid question. If you're … Continue reading The Top 10 Tips For Being A Great Manager (Not Really)
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 one of these people. I think I may spend around eleven hours each day looking at a screen. In the morning my eyes … Continue reading Screen Addiction
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?
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 after reading this profile on Clayton Christensen in the New Yorker. Christensen is a Harvard Business School professor who became famous as a … Continue reading Of Personal Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent
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 dreadfully on our key metric - Guest Satisfaction Survey Scores (GSS Scores). We were consistently last or in the bottom five out of … Continue reading Results (Money) Are The Only Thing That Matters
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 lot younger. Granted, I'm still younger than most people reading this post, but just two months away from my thirtieth birthday and my … Continue reading Time
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, a typical day would have begun in the one bedroom apartment above the restaurant. He would come downstairs at the crack of dawn … Continue reading Going All In
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 end their tenure as a bitter and disruptive veteran. All things naturally decay, and performance is no exception to this rule. It's the … Continue reading Demma’s Employee Engagement Curve: How managers can fight performance atrophy
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 fact, I once heard a senior executive at our company tell a group of managers that if he doesn't grow and perform better … Continue reading When The Monster Stops Growing, It Dies
