Appreciate Your Staff The Wegman Way

What is your business' greatest resource?

Its location? Its size? Its technology? Hardly. Despite the value of all of these factors, the resource with the most potential to elevate and drive your business is its people. Whether it's the people on your front line or your back end, employee satisfaction leads to customer satisfaction, which leads to a business' success.

So how does a business create a pro-employee environment? At Wegman's Food Markets, a $5.15 billion supermarket chain with 35,000 employees and 80 stores in the northeast United States, you state your commitment to your workers in your tag line. Simple and powerful, Wegmans' philosophy is "Employees first, Customers second."

The philosophy has paid off as Wegmans has won hundreds of customer service, community and best place to work awards over the years. In fact, it's made Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For" list every year since it started in 1998. Wegmans' employee retention is also impressive at just 8 percent, half of the average for its industry. To attract and retain the best workers Wegmans relies on traditional methods - competitive pay, solid training and comprehensive benefits. But it goes further with values and best practices that make its stores a place employees love to work and customers love to shop. Here are some examples.

1. Training. Wegmans invests the necessary time to properly train its workers. Full-time employees' training averages around 6 months, and part-time employees' more than a month. In fact, Jo Natale, Wegmans director of media relations, says the store spends $1.5 to 2 million on labor costs in the six months prior to opening a new store. She says the company wants to be sure all employees have adequate time to participate in its onboarding programs, as well as live training in the store.

2. Communication: Communication is critical for building trust with your employees. Wegmans realizes this and aims to be transparent with its workers about its plans and strategies. "We don't ever want anything important happening that our employees don't hear first from us," said Natale. "We try to always give managers plenty of time to familiarize all staff with any changes so they aren't taken off guard." The strategy has been effective. In its best places to work poll, Fortune magazine asked employees, "Does management have a clear vision where it is going?" A whopping 96 percent of Wegmans employees answered yes. The dynamic builds trust with employees fulfilling their need for job security.

3. Invest in relationships: Wegmans leadership invest time and energy into developing relationships with its workers. For example, both HR executives and company leadership make frequent store visits to talk to its employees about their concerns and share best practices. "Relationships are certainly first and foremost for our business," Natale said. "The Wegman family are in our stores every week for a couple of days. It's important for them to make the personal connection so that the employees understand they are part of the Wegman family."

4. Manager Autonomy and Flexible Scheduling: Wegmans empowers its managers to work creatively and autonomously with its staff to meet their needs. For example, flexible scheduling, while often unheard of in retail, is standard at the stores. "Every time we poll our employees about what is most important to them on the job, flexible scheduling rises to the top," Natale said. "Whether it's the high school student that needs time off to work on a school play, or the retired teacher that wants to take line dancing classes, we work with our staff so they can have a work-life balance."

Greg Smith is a dynamic leadership speaker and organizational improvement consultant that has helped guide both small, medium and large organizations for over 25 years. If you want to select the right people, build effective teams, develop your managers, manage change and grow your business, we can help. Greg designs management training programs and action plans that transform businesses into best places to work. He is a motivational speaker and his keynotes leave a lasting positive impact on his audiences.

Function of Perception

The real understanding is to understand the mechanism as it is. It's worse to understand wrongly than to not understand at all. Thus someone may see someone else from some wrongful direction and thus see all they do as evil, or one can see what is actually going on. The misogynist types look at any part of the female mechanism with the eye toward demonization, and everything that is discovered gets misconstrued by being portrayed from the angle of the misogynist's interest: To damn everything that is found. This mechanism can be also stood on its head - by looking at all the misogynist's representation and finding the actual thing that it misrepresents.

Thus, a woman being beautiful can be misrepresented as vanity or as an attempt to manipulate men. One sees this misrepresentation and asks what it actually is portraying. From the perspective of the misogynist, anything the woman does is a function of evil, so he will look for any way that he can to misrepresent what the woman is doing as if it was something wrong. Based on his own portrayals, knowing this basic quantity of his perception, it then becomes possible to recognize what is actually going on behind his misrepresentation.

This misrepresentation function can be calculated out of the result to find the real situation. h(x)=f(g(x)): We see h(x) - the person's interpretation, g(x) is the function of what the person is describing or depicting, so g(x) - the actual phenomenon - is found by factoring f out of h.

Say someone thinks in terms of self-esteem and he feels that another person is lacking in self-esteem. We look at how this judgment is occasioned. One thinks that person who is being treated well by her partner has self-esteem and that person who does not lacks it. We get the judgment call ("she lacks self-esteem"); then we factor out the function of the person's perception (that someone who is in a bad situation lacks self esteem) and get the original fact of someone being in a bad situation. This is reverse functionality: You look at the judgment; factor out the person's perceptions; and then get the original event.

A Christian may claim that someone is prideful. How do they define prideful? In most cases, it is someone who follows anything other than their parish's party line. So when you hear a Christian claim that someone is prideful, we know that they are doing something other than what the parish wants them to do; which can be anything from cultivating knowledge and intelligence to producing art to having romantic relationships to wanting to make things better for other people on the planet.

A woman may think that another woman is a "slut." Whom would this woman be seeing as a slut? Probably someone who is sexually willing or enjoys sexuality. We factor out the judgment term and find the original fact: That the other woman is sexually willing or enjoys sex.

Educational Psychology for Organic Chemistry

Of all the sciences, there are some known to be far more challenging than others. Courses in general chemistry require an adept knowledge of algebra and mathematics along with the ability to apply such knowledge to physical systems. General physics takes this one step further, requiring a working knowledge of differential and integral calculus. Engineering raises the bar, demanding knowledge of deductive reasoning and higher order mathematics including differential equations and topology.

Even though courses in such subjects are challenging, there is one fundamental common denominator amongst them - mathematics. Bright students fair well because they've been learning the language of mathematics since first grade.

Organic Chemistry is different. It requires the learning of an "alien" language, which I often compare to Russian, along with fast-paced deductive reasoning in that language. Imagine taking Russian for the first time, studying for an exam, and learning in class that the midterm is a test of deductive reasoning requiring thought in Russian. Sounds like it would never happen, yes? Well, this is Organic Chemistry.

This course of logic based in visual-spatial learning with the intent of such learning to be applications to unknown problems requiring fast-paced deductive reasoning is taken by over one million students in the United States every year. It's not atypical for a class average grade to hover between 30-50%. Very bright students enroll in this course, and most of them receive an average grade of 38%. This is an immense shock to students accustomed to scoring at the high end of every other class they've taken.

Part of the problem is time management skills never having been developed, resulting in what I refer to as the "Drama of the Alarms." This is the series of "emergencies" that arise when the first three weeks of the quarter/semester are spent "coasting". When the first midterm arises, the student becomes serious and focuses exclusively upon the first midterm, ignoring everything else. Just before the first midterm, another "alarm" goes off, and the student realizes there is another impending exam. As soon as exam one is out of the way, the student "crams" for exam two. Just before exam two, the student "learns" (the syllabus never made it to the calendar) of another impending exam, takes exam two, and then crams for exam three.

Once the vicious cycle of the Drama of the Alarms is in motion, it's like a runaway freight train having acquired far too much momentum to stop. The drama continues until the end of the term, and costs the student one or more A-grades. Instead of learning time management skills, the student repeats the same pattern of behavior over and again until graduation.

Primary etiology of the "problem" in Organic Chemistry particularly is the comfortable habit of memorization used successfully to plan for examinations in virtually every other subject. This strategy fails in Organic Chemistry. Another factor is the deceptively simple nature of Organic Chemistry wherein one might look through notes, convince himself he knows the material only to learn days before a midterm that he's unable to work any of the problems successfully. The primary challenge is learning, and being expected to immediately rationalize in, this highly rigorous scientific visual-spatial language. There are no other university level courses like it, and Organic Chemistry routinely becomes a life-altering event.

The best teachers of Organic Chemistry are willing to do just about anything to get students to learn the subject. On one section of the blackboard, they write everything needed for student mastery of course objectives. They indicate memorization will be their demise, and that the only successful strategy is to develop skills in critical analysis and deductive reasoning, the very skills needed to excel in the MCAT. Exceptional teachers also take the time with each chapter of the textbook to apply principles learned to real-life problems of interest to the students. Finally, these amazing Organic Chemistry teachers make themselves available for review sessions either before a midterm or even on a weekly basis.

As teachers of Organic Chemistry, we cannot change the nature of the course and still maintain its integrity. This will never happen - it's a choice. We can, however, seek the advice of educational psychologists to learn how to get students to want to depart from the comfortable habit of memorization toward that of deductive reasoning, knowing the latter is what is expected on the MCAT. We can tell the students they have the choice of learning MCAT skills now with plenty of time to hone them, or they can obtain a C-grade in the course and hope that learning MCAT skills later might get them into some medical school.

Scare tactics are undesirable, however sadly they appear to work better than any method of positive reinforcement. There are many articles available on how to succeed in Organic Chemistry. Some are read whilst most are not. What little is read is hardly ever rendered to practice. Finally, nearly endless resources are available to promote student success in Organic Chemistry, however most are seldom utilized.

Educational psychology is a science, and this teacher of Organic Chemistry is appealing to educational psychologists for a viral strategy on how to effect permanent change in the outcome of undergraduate Organic Chemistry. Such change will necessitate addressing critical time-management issues. Also required will be introducing value to students so they choose to do what is harder (deductive reasoning) vs. what is comfortable (memorization). Indicating such skills will become immensely valuable on the MCAT appears like a logical approach, however the adversary here is the tendency toward procrastination. How many of us wait until April 10th to do our taxes?

This article is open ended. I am seeking the input of western educational psychologists, and am open to any suggestions that will empower students to pursue the study of Organic Chemistry with the intent of mastery rather than simply obtaining a passing grade. The time for bringing educational psychology into the university classroom with regards to this subject is long overdue.

Deciding Your Destiny Based on The Meaning of Dreams

The meaning of dreams is specific and can be accurately translated thanks to the extraordinary discoveries of the psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Jung. He was the only scientist who had the patience to look for the meaning of important images for all civilizations of the world. He could understand the mysterious meaning of the symbolic dream language and the psychology of dreams.

Carl Jung discovered that our dreams are produced by the wise unconscious mind, a mysterious organ that works like a natural psychotherapist. He concluded that the unconscious mind is God's mind, but he didn't have a religious attitude.

He considered the unconscious mind only as a good counselor for our conscience, even though he discovered that our conscience is one-sided because it works based on one psychological function well-developed and another one half-developed. We don't use the four psychological functions we have at our disposal:

Thoughts, feelings, sensations, and intuition.

We must develop our intelligence by developing the psychological functions that are not working in our conscience. This process of mind empowerment is carried on through dream translation. The unconscious mind explains to all dreamers everything about their psychological condition and what they have to do in order to find sound mental health, peace, and happiness.

I continued Jung's research from the point he had stopped. I discovered the unconscious sanctity, which Jung couldn't perceive because he was a cold scientist. He looked at the meaning of religion with scientific glasses.

I concluded that the ignorant and absurd human being must obey God's guidance in dreams instead of doing what his/her one-sided conscience desires.

I could understand God's revolt with the human race, without believing that God is evil because He is revolted with our evilness. I understood that God doesn't stop being saintly when He punishes us, because we are terrible sinners. God is our father. He cannot be indifferent to our mistakes.

I, who discovered this truth, had to obey God's guidance by staying far from the man I was in love with. I was forbidden to commit adultery. I obeyed this guidance against my will because I understood that I would never find peace and happiness based on my absurd desires.

From this example you can understand that obeying God's guidance is not a simple matter.

Everyone can easily eliminate their wild conscience when they obey God's guidance. However, nobody agrees with this obedience because everyone is a demon. Our demoniac nature is too strong. We are more controlled by our satanic anti-conscience than by our human conscience because we accept what is bad without fighting evilness.

This is why God cannot put an end to craziness, terror, violence, poverty, immorality, cruelty, hypocrisy, and greed.

Everybody believes in God only when they are suffering and they want to ask Him something. They say with faith and respect: "My God, please help me! Please, save me!"

However, when God tells them: "Accept a sacrifice for me, give your money to the poor, abandon your comfort zone, or change your plans", nobody wants to believe that God exists or that they will be punished because they are not doing what God demands from them.

Whenever God demands sacrifices, everybody says "I can't".

Then, they start thinking that perhaps God was created by the human imagination, perhaps nothing has any meaning, perhaps religion is just a fairy tale, and so on.

I had to be an exception and obey God's guidance, without being a coward like everyone in the hypocritical world.

Thanks to my total obedience to the divine guidance in dreams I could discover the anti-conscience, which is the wild side of the human conscience, and has satanic characteristics. The anti-conscience is violent, and feels pleasure with what is bad. It calms down with terror. This is why it is constantly trying to generate terror by generating mental illnesses within our conscience.

The evilness of the anti-conscience is the tragic result of the disorganized formation of the first live conscience by chance, before God's existence. God's conscience once was satanic too because the satanic anti-conscience is the mother of our reasoning system. We inherit this absurd and evil conscience in our brain because without it we cannot think.

This content must be transformed into human content during our lives. In other words, we live in order to learn the meaning of goodness and transform our satanic nature into human nature.

Now that God's existence and the satanic origin of the human conscience were scientifically proved, we will finally put and end to craziness and terror on Earth. These two important scientific discoveries will completely change the world.

Now that everyone can understand the dream language thanks to my simplifications and clarifications, everyone will learn Carl Jung's method of dream interpretation and find salvation. This valuable knowledge will put everyone into contact with God.

God will help everyone find sound mental health, peace, and happiness, and transform our living hell into a place where every individual will have the chance to evolve and attain spiritual perfection.

The meaning of dreams was devaluated by many distortions and suppositions. On the other hand, the materialistic and atheistic mindset of our historical time doesn't let you believe in God's existence.

This situation is gradually changing, but a process of transformation takes time.

You should be intelligent and study the scientific method of dream interpretation discovered by Carl Jung and simplified by me today, without waiting for the global recognition of my discoveries. I already showed you that I have many enemies because I represent the end of hypocrisy, and everyone is afraid of the truth. On the other hand, our commercial world works based on competition.

I already told everyone numerous times that the dream language is bread and water for the world. I'm not anyone's competitor because I teach everyone everything I know. Thus, everyone can become a professional dream translator like me and use this knowledge to their advantage.

However, nobody pays attention to my white flag.

You should understand the value of dream therapy today, and start transforming your personality without wasting time.

You'll become a scientist, an inventor, an artist, and a philosopher, and attain higher levels of knowledge. You'll solve all problems based on the unconscious guidance. This knowledge will be your best tool in life.

You only have to study the dream language with the same seriousness you study a foreign language when you have to live in another country. You'll have this precious knowledge for life. You'll use it to solve your personal problems, and you'll also help many other people.

The divine unconscious mind helps you find your perfect match, make good friends, become more intelligent and sensitive, influence others, make money, use all of your brain power, discover the spiritual dimension of your reality, and a lot more.

If you are following my lessons you know that I'm a very serious person. I worked very hard during 19 years before assuring you that you can trust the scientific method of dream interpretation and truly believe in the unconscious guidance.

You can learn the basics about the meaning of dreams thanks to my free lessons online. I give you important lessons because you must be able to evaluate how really helpful the accurate dream translations are in order to trust this method.

However, the dream language is a language like all the other languages made only by words, with the difference that it is made only by images. You have to seriously study this language. A language is not something you can learn only by reading a few books about it.

You have to learn the meaning of the most important terms by heart. You have to practice and translate various documents from this language to your language in order to really understand its meaning.

The beginning is difficult because in the beginning you ignore everything, but the beginning doesn't last forever. Before you'll know, you'll verify that you are able to translate your dreams and your friends' dreams.

My simplifications are really meaningful. They are not just a few shortcuts.

The dream language is more complicated than a language made only by words because it is symbolic, and it is made only by images. This language also follows a different logic. You must get used to the way the unconscious mind thinks because the unconscious mind is the dream producer.

You have to practice and actually translate many dreams; not only your own dreams, as well as other people's dreams. The dream language is always the same. Once you learn the meaning of the most important dream symbols and the dream logic, you are able to translate anyone's dreams.

This knowledge is more important that your survival.

Your life on Earth has a limited duration. However, you also have a spirit. You should care more about your spirit than about your body.

You should also care about God's existence because you are constantly judged. God is your friend when you obey His guidance and you try to be a good person. However, when you are lazy and indifferent to His lessons, you have to be punished.

God knows that your anti-conscience is controlling your behavior, and this is why you are doing what is negative for you and for your environment. He cannot let you make mistakes without trying to save your mental health.

You must feel sorry for God (who works like a natural psychotherapist) because He is trying to transform you into a wise human being, while you are so imperfect, and you prefer what is bad.

God is your doctor, and also your father. He cares about your destiny. He loves you because you are His child. God gave you a human conscience. You wouldn't be able to think like a human being without this gift. Without the human conscience you receive from God, you would think like a demon all the time.

God cannot let you follow a route that will imprison your conscience into the labyrinth of craziness. He must do everything He can to prevent this tragic end.

If you have many problems in your daily life, this is because you are doing what is bad for you, and being always more controlled by your wild side. God is always more revolved with you because you are passively accepting your anti-conscience's absurdity without offering resistance before its craziness.

God wants to help you and save you from craziness and terror by teaching you the meaning of goodness.

However, He becomes your enemy when you prefer what is bad and you do exactly what your anti-conscience suggests. God is obliged to punish you with diseases and pains. He makes you lose your job. He makes you face constant problems in all matters. God abandons you when He is abandoned.

This means that you should be afraid of God because God cannot ignore your sins.

God is good with you when you are obedient and you wait until you'll be able to receive all the benefits you can have if you'll positively transform your personality. You must be obedient and humble like Saint Mary and Saint Joseph. You must give joy to your divine doctor for being cured from a mental illness, or for preventing a mental illness thanks to your obedience to the divine wisdom.

Pay attention to my example. If I wouldn't obey God's guidance and respect my moral principals, God wouldn't be able to help me prevent schizophrenia. I would completely lose my already partially destroyed human conscience.

Now I believe that you'll pay more attention to my discoveries.

When I was showing you how many benefits you have when you try to be a good person by doing what the unconscious mind shows you in your dreams, you were not really interested on studying the dream language.

When I told you that you must follow the divine guidance in dreams because God suffers with your indifference, you had no intention to precisely obey God's guidance.

However, now that I'm telling you that you had better be afraid of God because He punishes you through many ways when you do what your anti-conscience suggests, I believe that you will understand the seriousness of this matter.

If you betray God because you don't use the human conscience He gave you to fight absurdity and become a wise human being, but you do what your anti-conscience suggests and you become a monster, God is always revolted with you.

You are not responsible for having inherited a satanic conscience, and you are not responsible for your actions when your anti-conscience manages to destroy your human conscience and you commit crimes.

However, you are responsible for your actions when your conscience is still alive, but you prefer what is bad and you do what your ego desires. Your ego is the center of your human conscience, but it is easily manipulated by your evil anti-conscience.

God judges you depending on your attitude before losing your human conscience. You are responsible for preserving the human conscience given to you when you were born. If you'll let Satan destroy your human nature, God won't protect you.

You will be treated like a demon, because you will really be a demon, since your anti-conscience will control your behavior.

Therefore, you won't find peace and happiness, and you won't attain sanctity. Your spirit will suffer forever, without learning the meaning of goodness.

I hope you'll understand that you have only advantages when you obey God's guidance, even if you have to change your plans and suffer for a certain period of time, because you have to accept making a sacrifice. It will surely be better for you to suffer in order to respect your moral principals and save your sanity, than suffering as a victim of craziness, without finding salvation.

Christina Sponias continued Carl Jung's research into the human psyche, discovering the cure for all mental illnesses, and simplifying the scientific method of dream interpretation that teaches you how to exactly translate the meaning of your dreams, so that you can find health, wisdom and happiness.

Virus of the Mind

A message implanted in the brain is done in such a way that people genuinely believe that it is their original thought or will. The brain can be stimulated by many external media, such as advertisements to purchase goods.

Brain virus can affect the way we live or even induce suicide. Religious beliefs are carefully selected brain viruses.

Throughout history people have committed atrocities in the name of their God.

Strong and weak people infected by the brain virus will react completely differently. Brain virus may use threats, fear, pleasure and other senses and desires in order to achieve and act upon the selected target.

Anti-brain-virus (ABV) is the personal ability to ignore and overcome implanted viruses. Phase I - implant, Phase II - evolve, Phase III - act.

ABV will go into action after it recognizes that a message on which we are about to act is a virus.The defence mechanisms against mind viruses can assist us in changing or eliminating those thoughts which are imposed upon us by the implanted viruses.

Certain memories fade faster than others, possibly depending on our need or willingness to remember or forget.

In early experiments on rats, scientists found a certain enzyme which caused memory to fade more rapidly than usual. This finding suggests the possibility of selectively erasing certain undesired memories. Does it work the other way, too? Can we boost or enhance our memory?

Future research could lead to genetically engineered brain virus, which will enable such memory enhancement.

A spin-off of brain virus is brainwashing, which originated during the Korean War in the 1950s.

Brainwashing is defined as the application of certain techniques, usually coercive, to manipulate or change a person's beliefs, values, perceptions and judgments. Subsequently, it affects the behaviours of that person.

The purpose of brainwashing is usually to change someone's political, personal, or religious opinions and beliefs.

The Chinese used brainwashing methodologies under the Maoist regime. Their aim was to transform individuals with a reactionary imperialist attitude into 'right-thinking' members of the new Chinese social system.

It was largely done in two phases. First, the person's psychic integrity was broken down by dehumanization, and then when they were 'clean' they would go through certain rites.

Cults in general use brainwashing techniques to recruit members into their organization. The 1960s to the 1970s was a decade when mind control theories were applied by religious movements, especially in the USA.

The success of many a totalitarian regime can be explained by the use of brainwashing and mind-controlling techniques.

Brainwashing or mind control theories are researched from neuroscience and social psychology perspectives. The activation of brainwashing can be done by manipulating the prefrontal cortex of the brain.

Project MKULTRA was the code name for a covert, illegal CIA human research programme run by the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence during the 1950s and 1960s.

This project used scientific, medical and psychological methodologies to manipulate individuals' mental states and alter their brain functions.

Diverse and complex combinations of chemicals, drugs, hypnosis, isolation and sexual abuse were used.

A short summary from the New York Times (August 2nd, 1977) is given below:

The C.I.A. leaders were certain the Communists had embarked on a campaign to control men's minds and they were determined to find a defense, setting out in earnest the next year-1950-with Project Bluebird, which evolved into Project Artichoke, then became MK-ULTRA, MK-DELTA.

They wanted to be able to interrogate enemy espionage agents in such a way that neither the agents nor their superiors would know they had been compromised, and they wanted to be able to wipe clean the memories of their own agents after certain missions and, especially, when they were going into retirement.

The evolution of human communication - humans cannot exist without communicating with each other for various purposes.

Different forms of communication are required for everyday life, entertainment and many other areas.

Communication can be verbal, telepathic, musical, use signs or SMS, electronic and other non-electronic means, and use visual and audio signals.

In the prehistoric era, fire, smoke signals, beacons, drums and horns were used.

The mail was introduced about the sixth century BC and pigeons were used to send post from the fifth century BC.

Semaphore, which is a system for communicating by means of visual signals, using towers with blades, was introduced in the fourth century BC and the heliograph, which is a wireless solar telegraph that uses signals based on Morse code and mirrors reflecting flashes of sunlight, was used from 490 BC.

The maritime flag system was introduced about the fifteenth century and signal lamps were used from the nineteenth century, mainly by the navy using Morse code.

The electrical telegraph was in use from 1836 and the telephone, photophone (radio-phone) and the radio were invented in between 1876 and 1896.

The television has been in use since the late 1920s, the videophone from the 1930s, telecommunication using fibre optics since 1964 and computer networking since 1969.

Cellular mobile phones came onto the market in 1981 followed by email and the Internet, and satellite phones have been in use since 1998.

What next?

It is believed that, as the technology improves, these communication devices may become part of our body, rather than an accessory which we carry or wear.

We could become wired organisms and meet each other in a new medium in cyberspace.

About the author: Dr. Giora Ram is an interdisciplinary scientist in physics, mathematics, computer science, and medicine. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith London.

Dr. Giora Ram has published many scientific and philosophical articles and he is the author of five books:
In Hebrew (3): "ADHD - Children of Tomorrow", a co-production with his son about unique treatments for ADHD. "The House on the Hill", poems and love letters. "My Love, My Wife, My Divorcee", mating and dating.
In English (2): "The Hungarian Connection", an autobiographical novel and "Sex and Scientific Philosophy", scientific and philosophical insights observed, analysed and researched by the author.