5 Masterful Ways That People With Emotional Intelligence Avoid Drama and Conflict

In a recent report, top human resources officers revealed that emotional intelligence will be a required job skill by the year 2020. Coming in at number six was emotional intelligence, which surprisingly landed above more cognitive skills like “judgment and decision-making” and “negotiation.”

Do your employee medical files meet ADA privacy requirements?

Contrary to popular belief, the most significant law for employers with regard to medical privacy is the Americans with Disabilities Act, not the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

3 speaking strategies for leaders from technical backgrounds

Being asked to speak in front of an audience can be an intimidating prospect for anyone. But for people who come highly technical backgrounds, the idea is even more daunting.

Are you MIA? A 10-step algorithm for being present

MIA stands for missing in action, which is the way others can experience you when you’re too busy multi-tasking, being pulled at by the world and by everything that’s going on in your head and essentially when you’re too busy being busy.

I Took 250 Coffee Meetings in 400 Days. Here’s What I Learned About Networking

When I quit my job as an IT consultant and joined the technology startup community in Chicago, I didn’t know a single soul.
When I say that I didn’t know anyone, I mean it in the most literal sense. I didn’t know a single person.

AT&T’s plan for high-speed internet over power lines reaches the trial phase

AT&T (NYSE: T) says Project Airgig, its project to deliver high-speed internet over power lines, has reached the trial phase.
The Dallas telco said that it’s partnering with Georgia Power for its US-based trial of the project. An international trial is already underway, the company said.

First state opts out as AT&T’s FirstNet proposals reach crucial final weeks

With just a little more than two weeks remaining before the deadline, 36 states and territories have opted into the nationwide network for first responders that will be built by AT&T (NYSE: T).
But uncertainty remains for the Dallas telecom, which is contracted by the U.S. government’s FirstNet Authority for the job: 19 states and territories have yet to announce their choice, while one recently became the first to opt-out.

Fake News Helped Kill Net Neutrality. Will the Telecom Industry Now Kill the News?

If you think the end of net neutrality is the bad news today, you’re in for some more. Remember that whole thing about election interference? It may have been adapted–possibly with a criminal upgrade–to hack our regulatory process.

Flow Of Information Can Make Or Break The CFO

It’s one of the toughest jobs in business — interpreting financial data about the enterprise.
If financial planning and analysis (FP&A) doesn’t make accurate forecasts, then strategy suffers. Company chief financial officers are charged with making make sure forecasts are right. With corporate capital finite, the impact of wrong bets can be big.

U.S. government warns businesses about cyber bug in Intel chips

(Reuters) – The U.S. government on Tuesday urged businesses to act on an Intel Corp alert about security flaws in widely used computer chips as industry researchers scrambled to understand the impact of the newly disclosed vulnerability.

Flow Of Information Can Make Or Break The CFO

It’s one of the toughest jobs in business — interpreting financial data about the enterprise.
If financial planning and analysis (FP&A) doesn’t make accurate forecasts, then strategy suffers. Company chief financial officers are charged with making make sure forecasts are right. With corporate capital finite, the impact of wrong bets can be big.

If You Prioritize Your 2018 Goals This Way, You’ll Reach Every Single One of Them

This is the time of year when it’s most natural to think, “Another year just went by. What happened?“
To effectively set goals for yourself, first you have to understand why you didn’t achieve the goals you had previously set.

Envisioning Leadership In The C-Suite Of The Future

On today’s business battleground, companies can’t afford to maintain the traditional, hierarchical leadership model that has prevailed for so many years. Delegating decision-making power to a small group of individuals at the very top requires slowing down the pace so leadership can carefully weigh options and strategize the best course for all stakeholders. In the current climate, time is a luxury competitive companies can’t afford to waste.

Microsoft buys Chevron’s data center in San Antonio to fuel its cloud

A major Houston-based energy company sold its San Antonio data center to a West Coast cloud computing giant in a deal that was filed during late October, one day after the company announced it signed up as a client for cloud services, public records show.

Chevron USA Inc., a subsidiary of Chevron Corp., sold its 5200 Rogers Road data center to Microsoft Corp. on Oct. 31. It was appraised to be worth $80 million, according to the Bexar County Appraisal District. The value of the sale was not disclosed.

Strong social network important to brain health

Maintaining a strong social network leads to slower cognitive decline among the elderly, a new Northwestern University study found — and we’re not talking about how many Facebook friends they have.

Close personal ties with friends and family members seem to be related to better memory retention, according to the latest findings of Northwestern University’s ongoing SuperAger study, which looks at people who are at least 80 years old but have the cognitive ability of people 20 to 30 years younger.

This Is Why Good Employees Resign Within Their First Year (And What You Can Do About

If good employees are leaving your company within their first year, there is one big reason why that isn’t widely talked about. Here are three things you can do to prevent it.

Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak

WozU announced Thursday the launch of a digital institute that aims to reprogram tech education and to inspire the next generation of innovators. And he wants to do it from Arizona. It will be called Woz U.

Here’s The Top Emotional Need of Employees (And Why You Should You Really Care)

Keep your work culture successful by knowing how to handle the top emotional need of employees. No helicopter leaders need read this (unless you want to change your tactics). I’ll get right to the bottom line. An employee’s primary emotional need is….. acceptance. Now you know. The big question is what do you do with this information.

Cisco Systems Inc

(Reuters) – Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O) will buy software company BroadSoft Inc (BSFT.O) for $1.71 billion, it said on Monday, in a deal that boosts Cisco’s collaboration tools and helps the company diversify its offerings away from switching and routing.

How to leverage millennial employees to build brand culture

By now, you’ve most certainly heard that millennials have disrupted the consumer marketplace and set a new standard for how modern brands must think and behave. The workplace is no exception. Over the past decade, there’s been a boom in retiring Boomers (pun intended), and millennials are surpassing the oft-forgotten Generation X as the largest generation in the U.S. workforce.

Want Your Best Employees to Never Leave You?

Whenever I deliver keynotes on leadership topics, I make sure to touch on the most important aspect that a leader needs to become truly exceptional: valuing his or her people. If that has triggered your own thinking about whether your employees are truly valued, there are proven ways you can raise your own leadership bar. Here are four:

Newbridge Technology Solutions
Contact Center Technology That Exceeds Expectations

Newbridge partners with its customers to identify and design the appropriate workforce solution for their organization. We are focused on the individual needs of our clients and work closely with them to understand their business. In today’s global marketplace, businesses must increase productivity, improve efficiency, and outperform the competition. Newbridge enables its clients to focus on their core competencies while improving operational effectiveness and customer satisfaction.

Dealing With Difficult People Much Less Painful

Dealing with difficult people is, well, difficult. All the mind tricks and self-restraint in the world can’t make it pleasant. But there are degrees of torture. There’s a difference between letting their negativity seep into your entire day, driving up your own stress and causing a whole host of horrible mental and physical health outcomes, and just being momentarily annoyed before moving on.

Why Cybersecurity Should Be A No. 1 Business Priority…

Last year was terrible for corporate victims of cyberattacks, with many large organizations making headlines over reports of major breaches. Ransomware attacks quadrupled to 4,000 per day from 2015 to 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Despite the evidence, most companies greatly understate the risk of a cyber incident, according to EY’s 19th Global Information Security Survey 2016-17. Of the 1,735 global executives, information security managers and IT leaders surveyed, only one in five (22 percent) fully consider information security in their strategy and planning.

Your Company Is A Contact Center

Why is it that in the moments that matter most — we spend the least amount of resources and effort to take care of our customers? It’s this lack of self-awareness that will be the demise of the world’s biggest companies. The bigger the company gets, the harder it seems to be to create one experience for all customers. However shouldn’t it be easier for bigger companies to create compelling customer experiences because they have more resources to do so?

Why Communication Awareness Matters

When we better understand what someone is actually looking to get out of a conversation we save time and facilitate better outcomes. Read the article and then contact a Newbridge consultant to get communication awareness in your next contact center technology conversation!

Its official sole chat is dead

The measure of good customer service is straightforward: At the end of it, you want people to like you. This is only slightly complicated by the fact that “you,” in this case, is a corporation, traditionally a faceless entity, even in the U.S., where it is considered a person in the eyes of the law.

“We’re actually trying to figure out how to get customers to call us more often,” says Tony Hsieh, chief executive of Zappos, which is legendary for being a customer-service operation that happens to sell shoes. “Our goal is by the time the customer gets off the phone, it’s like they’ve made a new friend.” Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh talks with WSJ’s Dennis Berman at the WSJDLive 2015 conference in Laguna Beach, Calif. about his company’s novel governance style.

How to get employees moving in the same direction

Article in the Atlanta Business Journal provides some good insight on how business leaders can overcome their biggest challenge: aligning employees to get the right things done, by sorting through all their tasks to know which ones have the biggest impact on their company’s objectives. When it comes to your company’s technology decisions, are you all moving in the same direction?

Work keeps nearly half of workers up at night, according to a new CareerBuilder survey.

One in four workers feel they do not get enough sleep at night, and 60 percent of all workers say that a lack of sleep has negatively impacted their work — from making workers less productive (25 percent) to making them resent their jobs (8 percent).

How to overcome challenges in moving to a cloud-centric network

Ecosystems, APIs, open source software, agile development, COTS servers, programmable network; these are some of the attributes of the cloud that service providers plan to leverage by using technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV). Service providers plan to move from closed appliances to open servers and software components.