"In the wake of the great recession, in businesses and organizations around the world, we have a crisis on our hands. But it's not the crisis we all think it is and talk about. It's worse. ... We don't have an Employee Engagement crisis. We have a Leadership Engagement crisis. It should be no surprise that only 13% of employees are engaged when you discover that only 19% of managers and executives are engaged! Engaged Leaders are outnumbered 4 to 1 by those who are not. Bradford D. Smart (Topgrading) reports that the top Human Resources executives of the largest 100 companies in the world admit that only 20% of managers they hired turned out to be the high performers they expected. 'That's an 80% mis-hire rate!' Smart, says. And yet, these are the same leaders that we are expecting to raise levels of Employee Engagement in our organizations. Maybe the old saying is still true—people join organizations but they leave managers."

"Inspiration is the most used and abused word in our daily existence. Whether it is business, politics, sports, or any other endeavor of life, inspiration is considered to be the panacea or silver bullet which can transform personal lives and propel organizations to unbelievable heights. No wonder, everyone (individuals and organizations alike) is constantly seeking this transformational wonder and are expending an enormous amount of money and time in this search. It has come to such frenzy that a large number of experts have surfaced as inspirational gurus and are having a brisk commercial business by offering their expertise to inspire individuals and organizations. However, despite this obsession to master the art of inspiration, most individuals and organizations do not achieve their desired goals and keep on guessing what went wrong."

"Social psychologists have determined that primitive humans, in their struggle for existence, developed the ability to judge other people almost instantly along two categories of perception, which are known as warmth and competence. In fact, all humans have a primal, unconscious ability to make these two crucial judgments with a high degree of speed and accuracy: What are the intentions of this person toward me? And how capable are they of carrying out those intentions? [...] We apply these warmth and competence judgments in all our relationships, including those involving commercial transactions. Companies and brands have the same capacity to stir up these hard-wired primal passions as people do, and we engage with them on the same basis. We experience feelings of affection and admiration for companies and brands that treat us well, and we feel insult or even rage when we believe that one of those companies has given us poor service or cheated us. [...] Unfortunately, our studies show that most companies and brands fall well short of customer expectations on both warmth and competence. They are seen as selfish, greedy, and concerned only with their own immediate gain. The constant pressure for faster and larger profits raises the question of whether most of them can ever meet the standards for trust that we all unconsciously expect from everyone we interact with."