CNN and USA Today are reporting that RadioShack just fired 450 employees…by email.

The workforce reduction notification is currently in progress…Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.

According to CNN, a RadioShack spokesperson said electronic notification was “quicker.” Though employees were notified in advance (how, by email?) that layoff notices would be delivered electronically, this [...]

Several years ago, I was teaching one of my most beloved courses, Interpersonal Conflict, which I wrote about in a series of posts earlier this summer. In the course, my mediation grad students are asked to confront and improve their own “conflict stuff” as part of learning to be better mediators.
One day that particular [...]

Before you read this post, please, please, please understand: If you are or were a nurse, love or loved a nurse, were once saved by a nurse, have a nurse in your family or neighborhood, or a best friend who is a nurse…this is not a commentary about nurses.
This is a commentary on the women [...]

A decade ago when I was a college dean, I’d come home at the end of very long days and my guy Rod would ask, “How was your day?”
My days as a dean were rather like giant fire extinguisher days. In fact, when I left the job to found my conflict management practice, my staff [...]

Would you recognize the good cop/bad cop tactic if you saw it in a negotiation? Would you know a bogey if you saw one? What about a nibble?
Last month, I wrote about negotiating strategically and suggested that one key is to recognize and neutralize hardball negotiation tactics when you see them. The [...]

Eighty-six years ago this week, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. How consistently do you exercise the right that women of our grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ generations were beaten and imprisoned to achieve for you?
If you read my writing and musings, I assume you have an interest in women’s voices, building relationship and [...]

Have you ever been in a meeting where the chair asked something like, "Does that plan sound ok to everyone?" Perhaps there was a brief pause, an assenting remark or two, a couple of nods and silence from the rest. "All right, then it’s a go," the chair may have said then.
Silence does not mean [...]