Observation Deck

Before I ask you to invest precious minutes of your day reading another newsletter, I first need to answer the intriguing question uttered by Ross Perot’s 1992 Presidential campaign running mate Admiral James Stockdale, “Who am I?  And why am I here?”

CDG & Associates is a learning organization and teaching organization.  We love to take in new knowledge, digest it, and pass it along in a way that is useful to our clients and prospects in their day-to-day operations.  We know you only have so many minutes in your day to invest in learning new information.  You probably don’t scour your office looking for something else to read.  So why do you want this newsletter? 

1.   The subject matter affects you

2.   You’ll get a lot of information with a small investment of time

3.   It’s light, and fun to read

 Do you ever feel like you’ve wasted time when you’re reading a book and the author explains a single concept, page after page, from this angle and that angle, and gives you examples and supports his position as if he’s defending his graduate dissertation?  Finally, he sums up the entire chapter with a clear, concise jewel of insight that puts everything in perspective.  I wish I had gone straight to that paragraph and saved half an hour.   

My wife is an excellent cook and makes quite possibly the world’s greatest chicken and dumplings.  Not just your run-of-the-mill, cafeteria variety chicken and dumplings, but fill up the house with aroma, get the mouth watering, make grandma jealous, don’t eat lunch in anticipation of dinner chicken and dumplings.  She tells me her secret is in the chicken stock (sorry Honey, I let the hen out of the bag.) She makes the stock before she begins doing anything else.  She starts with a chicken and a pile of vegetables, numerous spices, and puts them all in a pot large enough to drag to the curb on Tuesday mornings.  She fills the pot with water, turns the gas on high and boils and boils and boils.  Occasionally, she walks by and stirs.  At precisely the right moment, she somehow lifts the concoction from the stove and pours it all through a sieve, catching the remaining nectar in a much smaller pot.  (That’s it?  All that cooking for that little pot of juice?)  But what’s left is the important stuff.   

That’s what we’re doing with this newsletter – the “chicken stock” of newsletters, if you will.  We’re culling through the HRIS, benefits, and payroll information and giving you what’s important in a quick read so you can apply it to your own business and make your own world-class chicken and dumplings.     

Now for the meat and potatoes.

Dan Myers

Director of Marketing