Presidents and CEOs sound like they are more valuable decision-makers than directors, and directors sure sound better than managers. We won’t waste our time with the staff and especially the gatekeepers because they don’t make decisions–right?

The truth is, they do make decisions. They make decisions every day that in some way affect the operation of the company.

Prevost presents a simple but effective solution:

Your best bet for contacting the people that own the problem is to start describing the problem. If you are selling copiers, call into your target company’s sales department and put the other person in a problem situation. Tell the sales rep on the other end: “I could really use your help. If your network printer-copier had a meltdown today, who would get the most heat for getting that thing back up and operational?”

Getting in touch with that person can certainly get a dialogue started quicker…and may lead to chance to present your solution to those who can sign the contract!

A fashion model’s suit against Boies, Schiller & Flexner stemming from alleged negligence in its handling of her claims against modeling agencies has been revived by a state appellate court.

In an unsigned decision, the Appellate Division, 1st Department, Tuesday reinstated two causes of action by the model, Mary Anne Fletcher, against Boies Schiller and a former partner at the firm, Andrew W. Hayes. The panel said Fletcher had provided sufficient detail for her malpractice claims to support the $10 million in damages she is seeking.

The entire article is here.

According to the article, companies who embrace a culture of civic and community responsibility and giving receive a huge return, including “double bottom-line results in employee loyalty and revenue”:

• Members on the 2009 Corporate Responsibility Officer’s 100 best corporate citizens list reported a 2.37 percent return shareholder value over three years, while the 30 “worst” corporate citizens experienced a negative 7.38 percent return.
• A Cone study found nearly eight of ten Millennials (those born 1980 and after) want to work for a company that contributes to society, while more than half say they would refuse to work for an “irresponsible corporation.”
• A 2010 CSR Perception Survey conducted by Penn Schoen Berland found 40 percent of respondents said they would take a pay cut to work at a socially responsible company, and 72 percent would sacrifice spending or salary to support corporate social responsibility initiatives.
• The same survey found 75 percent of consumers say corporate responsibility is important to them, and they are more likely to purchase products or services from a company after reading its responsibility agenda.

The article concludes with a question: “What are some corporate civic engagement models and practices you have found to be effective, engaging, and sustainable?” We found many of the responses in the comments following the article to be quite creative and motivating. We encourage you to read them, and add your own below in our comment section. We will feature some of the top answers in a future blog post.

The department released an important clarification/interpretation of the definition of “son or daughter” under Section 101(12) of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) as it applies to an employee standing in loco parentis to a child. According to the clarification, the benefits of FMLA apply even if the employee is not a biological parent as long as they are in loco parentis. This means that even if they are not an adopted child, FMLA applies.

Read the entire letter here.

A two-day sting has led to the closure of 70 Florida businesses — including 24 in South Florida — because of violations of the state’s workers’ compensation laws.

Random site visits by the state Department of Financial Services found the companies failed to provide workers’ compensation insurance for their employees. State law says construction-related companies must have workers’ compensation coverage if they have one or more employee, including the owner. Other businesses must have the coverage if they employ four or more employees, excluding business owners.

Most of the 24 were in Miami-Dade County:

Aldo’s Pool, Americans Builders and Construction, Dianza Commercial Dry Wall System, Authentic Construction, Professional Carpentry USA, GA Stone, No Drip Plumbing, JJJ Finishing Master, Built Top Building Services, Superior Wood Floor, Unlimited Ceiling Corp., Reinolds H. Castro Inc., Laura’s Management, J.R.F. Florida Painting Corp., ABC Seamless Rain Gutters, Jose Ber Tile, Zepol, Allen R. Greenwald, Mercado Enterprise, Articpolo Inc., Enloe Carpentry.

The article asserts that to protect your decisions against bias, you first need to know when to trust your gut feelings – that you must first feel confident that you are drawing on appropriate experiences and emotions. They supply four tests in order to get this information:

1. The familiarity test: Have we frequently experienced identical or similar situations?

Familiarity is important because our subconscious works on pattern recognition. If we have plenty of appropriate memories to scan, our judgment is likely to be sound; chess masters can make good chess moves in as few as six seconds. “Appropriate” is the key word here because many disastrous decisions have been based on experiences that turned out to be misleading—for instance, the decision General Matthew Broderick, an official of the US Department of Homeland Security, made on August 29, 2005, to delay initiating the Federal response following Hurricane Katrina.

The way to judge appropriate familiarity is by examining the main uncertainties in a situation—do we have sufficient experience to make sound judgments about them? The main uncertainties facing Broderick were about whether the levees had been breached and how much danger people faced in New Orleans. Unfortunately, his previous experience with hurricanes was in cities above sea level. His learned response, of waiting for “ground truth,” proved disastrous.

Gary Klein’s premortem technique, a way of identifying why a project could fail, helps surface these uncertainties. But we can also just develop a list of uncertainties and assess whether we have sufficient experience to judge them well.

2. The feedback test: Did we get reliable feedback in past situations?

Previous experience is useful to us only if we learned the right lessons. At the time we make a decision, our brains tag it with a positive emotion—recording it as a good judgment. Hence, without reliable feedback, our emotional tags can tell us that our past judgments were good, even though an objective assessment would record them as bad. For example, if we change jobs before the impact of a judgment is clear or if we have people filtering the information we receive and protecting us from bad news, we may not get the feedback we need. It is for this reason that “yes men” around leaders are so pernicious: they often eliminate the feedback process so important to the development of appropriate emotional tags.

3. The measured-emotions test: Are the emotions we have experienced in similar or related situations measured?

All memories come with emotional tags, but some are more highly charged than others. If a situation brings to mind highly charged emotions, these can unbalance our judgment. Knowing from personal experience that dogs can bite is different from having a traumatic childhood experience with dogs. The first will help you interact with dogs. The second can make you afraid of even the friendliest dog.

A board chairman, for example, had personally lost a significant amount of money with a previous company when doing business in Russia. This traumatic experience made him wary of a proposal for a major Russian expansion in his new company. But he also realized that the experience could be biasing his judgment. He felt obliged to share his concerns but then asked the rest of the board to make the final decision.

4. The independence test: Are we likely to be influenced by any inappropriate personal interests or attachments?

If we are trying to decide between two office locations for an organization, one of which is much more personally convenient, we should be cautious. Our subconscious will have more positive emotional tags for the more convenient location. It is for this reason that it is standard practice to ask board members with personal interests in a particular decision to leave the meeting or to refrain from voting. Also for this reason, we enjoy the quip “turkeys will not vote for Christmas.”

A similar logic applies to personal attachments. When auditors, for example, were asked to demonstrate to a Harvard professor that their professional training enabled them to be objective in arriving at an audit opinion, regardless of the nature of the relationship they had with a company, they demonstrated the opposite.

In general, the author states if a situation fails even one of these four tests, you need to “strengthen the decision process to reduce the risk of a bad outcome.”

Workers’ compensation insurers are required to return excess profits pursuant to Section 627.215, Florida Statutes. The Office recently performed an evaluation of submitted data that included earned premium and incurred losses. The Office determined that 16 different workers’ compensation insurance companies or groups realized excess profit as defined by statute for the 2005, 2006 and 2007 calendar/accident years.

“… we hold that an employer is not, as a matter of law, entitled to the Faragher/Ellerth affirmative defense simply because an employer’s sexual harassment policy provides that the plaintiff could have complained to other persons as well as the alleged harasser. Instead, we conclude that the facts and circumstances of each case must be examined to determine whether, by not pursuing other avenues provided in the employer’s sexual harassment policy, the plaintiff unreasonably failed to take advantage of the employer’s preventive measures. In some instances, it may be unreasonable for a victim of harassment to complain only to the harasser because, as a realistic and practical matter, there are other channels that are adequately indicated and are accessible and open. But, in other cases, there may be reasons why the plaintiff failed to complain to those other than the harasser, who are listed as available. And in such cases, a genuine issue of fact may be raised as to whether it was reasonable not to pursue other options.”