Happy holidays. Hopefully 2011 was a good year with forward progress in your business and/or career goals. Wishing you blessings and a prosperous 2012. Kelly

Right now I am teaching a personal financial planning course. It is a little outside of my areas of expertise so I brought in 2 guest lecturers. My students learned a lot from people in the finance industry as they teach outside of the textbook and more about real-world examples and application. The biggest lesson [...]

In all aspects of our daily lives we have to work in teams. It could be managing the to-do list with your spouse or directing a team (or project) at work. How the members of the team get along will determine how well or poorly things get done. Over the past few years I have [...]

Over the past couple of years some employers have taken advantage of the down economy and high unemployment rate by increasing job responsibilities, not honoring employee requests, or not providing yearly pay raises. Many employers are starting to notice the effects of doing so. One company recently offered pay raises to their employees because they [...]

I love this time of year. It forces us to spend time with our extended family, even when we sometimes might not want to. Thankfully, I am in a good place with most of my family members, including my in-laws. My children are really looking forward to seeing their grandparents and I am looking forward [...]

What motivates you to do your job? How do you respond to praise in the workplace? In your personal life? I am asking these questions because I have seen people change their level of motivation purely by letting them know that I care. Last term, I had a handful of students who were doing the [...]

I’m currently reading a book called Parenting with Love and Logic Teaching Children Responsibility by Foster Cline, M.D., and Jim Fay. You are probably wondering what in the world this has to do with business, let alone a blog post here. In reading this book, I realized the concepts could be applied to any relationship. [...]

A friend of mine wrote a booked called: Everyone Wins! Playing the Game of Conflict Resolution In All Your Relationships. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve had his book sitting on my bookshelf for a while now. I just finished reading Good to Great and was looking for another business book to read. Many times [...]

So here I sit debating whether or not I should resend my Monthly Minute newsletter after noticing 2 spelling errors. I used spell check, but missed these two words somehow. Oh well. I’m not perfect. Do I risk offending my subscribers by sending them a “corrected” version or just hope that most of them don’t [...]

It’s official. The March edition of the ASCPA Magazine (Arizona Society of CPAs) has announced that I am the recipient of the 2010 ASCPA Public Service Award. The award can only be “won” once and I am honored to have been chosen as their award winner in 2010. To read more visit the ASCPA.