(Time to read this Blog is about 3 minutes)

Before we get to the main topic, here are a few things to get you thinking or smiling:

1. My Biz Quote of the week:
   “Don’t waste your time fine-tuning a fundamentally obsolete business model.  Totally reinvent yourself, or sell it to someone who’s arrogant enough to think they’re getting a great deal, or do nothing and fade away.”
   …Donald Cooper.
    
2. Quick Biz Tip:
   The value of regular, weekly communication:
    
   One of the biggest complaints I hear from supervisors and front-line staff is that, ‘Nobody tells us what’s going on’. 
    
   Here’s a great ‘quick tip’ from Bruck Eckfeldt’s ‘Better Faster Newsletter’. As a business owner or manager, send out a brief ‘Weekly Update’ to your supervisory and front-line Team.  Send it out at the same time each week and use this simple template:
   1. Start with ‘Wins’.
   2. Recognize individual & Team performance.
   3. Reiterate strategies and priorities.
   4. Highlight examples of living our Core Values.
   5. Address concerns or questions.
   6. Ask for feedback and insights.

Start by creating ‘Weekly Update’ file and drop ideas into it as they come to you.  It’s amazing how creating a file for Projects turns the mind to finding material to add to that file.

3. Bad news for students…good news for you. For students and recent grads, 2025 is the worst Summer Job market in over 20 years.  But that’s good news for businesses because you can more easily hire top students for Summer jobs, or recent grads for full-time positions.
    
4. AI hugely outperforms human lawyers in reviewing Contracts. A project (reviewing Contracts) that took human lawyers 92 minutes to complete, with 85% accuracy was completed by AI in just 26 seconds with 94% accuracy.
    
5. The semi-fake $1 million dollar prize on ‘Canada’s Got Talent’. Another season of ‘Canada’s Got Talent’ wrapped up a few weeks ago.  Each week, we heard over and over again about the huge $1 million dollar prize, followed by the words “Thank You Rogers” (Rogers Communications, one of Canada’s largest media and sports entertainment companies).
    
   But, when you read the very small print that races across the screen at the end of each weekly episode, you learn that the prize money is paid out at the rate of $25,000 a year over a 40-year period.  WOW, more ‘small print trickery’!   Don’t do this in your business.

Now, to this week’s important topic:

Energize your Team.  Create a Culture of Celebration!

Is it part of your Culture to celebrate big wins, small successes, personal and corporate milestones and special days on the calendar?  Celebrations brighten our day, energize our journey and acknowledge our work.  They’re also FUN!  There are 4 categories of celebration for you to consider.  They’re listed below:

1. Celebrate company achievements, successes and milestones. It creates pride, joy and engagement.
2. Celebrate Team members’ special life events like birthdays, marriages, having a baby, beating cancer.
3. Celebrate special days on the calendar like Valentines Day, Groundhog Day, St Patrick’s Day, your country’s birthday, Mother’s Day, Halloween.
4. Finally, celebrate special, random ‘National’ days like National Cupcake Day, National Taco Day, National bring your pet to work day.  Does your industry, product or service have a special ‘National Day’? That would be natural for a celebration with both your Team and your customers. Go to https://www.daysoftheyear.com/ for monthly lists of the 100s of ‘special days’ throughout the year that you could use.

Does this mean that we should spend so much time celebrating that ‘the work’ doesn’t get done?  No, it means that we should spend a little more time celebrating so that we get more work done.  Most jobs in any business are repetitive and boring.  Some jobs are mind-numbingly boring.  Creating a culture of celebration, joy and recognition helps uplift and energize people to be more productive and engaged.  

For your next Team Meeting add to the Agenda, ‘How can we improve our Culture of Celebration’.  Refer to the 4 categories of celebration above.  Mark on a calendar every day in the year that you can do something special and fun to celebrate, recognize and energize.  Then, plan the fun!

That’s it for this week…

Live brilliantly and be kind to each other!       

Donald Cooper 

Donald Cooper speaks and coaches internationally on management, marketing, and profitability.  He can be reached by email at donald@donaldcooper.com in Toronto, Canada.