My thanks to my alumni, Watertown-Mayer School
My thanks to my alumni, Watertown-Mayer High School, for including me in their graduate’s of Watertown series. Also, gotta love the 80’s!

My thanks to my alumni, Watertown-Mayer High School, for including me in their graduate’s of Watertown series. Also, gotta love the 80’s!
Intertech landed on the Minneapolis Saint Paul Business Journal’s Best Places to Work for 2021. My thanks to our customers and employees for making us possible. Below is an excerpt from the article.
Intertech Inc., a 15-time Best Places to Work honoree, offers employees a sabbatical program, a flexible work-from-home policy, a signing bonus, and bonuses for referring employees and customers.For more about why this company is a BPTW, we asked CEO Tom Salonek:
What new policies or benefits did you introduce because of the pandemic that you will make or have made permanent? For over a decade, we’ve had a flexible work-from-home policy. With the pandemic, it was a simple transition to have employees work 100% from home. As we look at a return to work this fall, we expect a healthy amount of employees will continue to spend some or all of their time working from home.
What are some popular benefits you offer? Our sabbatical, where employees get three months off for every seven years of service, is very popular. We also offer a signing bonus for employees to outfit their home office, so they are as effective at home as at work.
How have you maintained your award-winning workplace culture this past year, especially if you have been primarily working remotely? Between our weekly newsletter, monthly all-company meetings and daily standups, we’ve worked to stay connected while apart.
Did the pandemic change your definition of what makes a great workplace? Going into the pandemic, we gave people autonomy, flexible work from home policy, and work-life balance. Those continue to be important in making a workplace great.
Why should your employees consider your organization a Best Place to Work? Intertech hires one out of every 20 technical candidates, and technical staff appreciates working with the best on challenging projects.
Intertech Inc.
Category: Small
Rank: 16
Score: 93.0488
Repeat wins: 15-time winner
Top Minnesota executive: Tom Salonek
Minnesota employees: 48
Business: Software consulting and training firm
City: Eagan
Web: intertech.com
What is your company culture in a #hashtag? #AttitudeCommitmentExcellence
The first magic word is “yes,” and getting someone to say “yes” before your actual ask increases your odds of success. In fact, in one study of salespeople, those that got the customer to say yes to anything a few times before they asked for the sale increased their success rate from 18 to 32%.
Our name. What’s the favorite word for any of us to hear? Want to make someone feel important? Use their name when you’re talking with them.
Another magic word is “but.” Saying but makes someone think that everything you said before the but isn’t what you mean.
If you want to get what you want, give a reason. A Harvard professor studied how someone using a copier shared why they needed to cut in line. 60% of the time, a person successfully cut in line because she shared her “because.”
Help. It’s useful when delegating. For most of us, “help” is a powerful word. When someone asks for help, we’re inclined to lean in and give our best.
The last magic word is “thanks.” Many years ago, I was part of an executive coaching, Strategic Coach program. Quarterly, I’d fly out to Chicago. The main tenants of the program shared that for us to be successful were to be on time, to what we say, to finish what we start, and say please and thank you.
In The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, the author shares what makes a psychopath and lessons we can learn from psychopaths.
The book shares that one to two percent of the population could be considered psychopaths. Psychopaths use charm and polish to cover up their evil side. They are brilliant and lack emotions like guilt, fear, and shame. Lack of fear makes them take chances and not worry about failure. This combination makes them a functioning psychopaths where they can end up in high positions like executives and surgeons.
The book shares an example of how differently psychopaths and non-psychopaths solve a moral dilemma: A train will run into and kill five people. You have a switch to divert the train to another track that will kill one person. For psychopaths they don’t hesitate to throw the switch. Non-psychopaths need time to make the decision, and if it required them to physically push one person into the train to save five lives, they wouldn’t do it. A psychopath would.
While most of us take time to think through the potential outcomes of our actions, psychopaths don’t. With a disdain for boredom, they act quickly. And, once they’ve swiftly acted and had success, they’re more likely to do it again—from a business decision to murder. Psychopaths do things that others only think about, which is why they could end up in prison or leading a business.
Psychopathy, like other mental conditions, isn’t binary. Instead, there’s a continuum. In this continuum, advancement can come from the moderate expression of many psychopathic qualities combined with restraint to not act immediately on every desire.
Psychopaths live in the here and now. They’re excellent at executing without letting feelings get in the way—because they don’t have them. Without emotion, this ability to be in the moment makes psychopaths good at high-risk fields like being a soldier or firefighter.
Along with being in the moment, psychopaths stay calm and take action versus seize up in fear when making a hard decision. This ability to take action gives psychopaths an advantage over regular people. So, how can an average person use psychopathic traits to their advantage? Use meditation as a way to be in the moment and use this practice to help make decisions. Also, like any good psychopath, understand the power of persuasion.
In my previous post on Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing, I shared the differences between blue and red oceans and the four principles of blue ocean strategy. In this post, I outline blue ocean elements and tools.
The earlier post mentioned humanness. Humanness has three elements:
Five tools implement a blue ocean shift:
The last step shared by the authors is a blue ocean fair. Invite top leaders to the fair. At the fair, start with a recap of your current red ocean. Share why a shift makes sense. Next, come presentations on new blue oceans. Each blue ocean idea should have a tagline. Each presentation should include a strategy canvas and the four actions framework.
When presentations finish, it’s time for the fair. A station represents each blue ocean idea. Stations have posters or product prototypes. Blue ocean working group members can be at their respective stations. The fair concludes with top leaders voting on the ultimate idea.
Blue ocean away!
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes