get busy with the present

If the daily grind is wearing you down and you worry you’ve been in the same job too long, spare a thought for 100-year-old Walter Orthmann, who’s been at the same company a record-breaking 84 years. 

Guinness World Records Ltd. announced that the Brazilian sales manager holds the official record for the “longest career in the same company” after verifying in January that he’d been with the same textile firm for more than eight decades.

The centenarian began working as a shipping assistant at Industrias Renaux SA, now named RenauxView, a year before the outbreak of World War Two, when he was just 15 years old. He was quickly promoted to a position in sales, an area where he remains to this day. 

For a little context, the median number of years that U.S. workers had been with their current employer in 2020 stood at 4.1, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

So what’s the secret of Orthmann’s exceptional career? 

“I don’t do much planning, nor care much about tomorrow. All I care about is that tomorrow will be another day in which I will wake up, get up, exercise and go to work,” Guinness quoted him as saying. 

“You need to get busy with the present, not the past or the future.”

De Wei Dexter Low

"This Manager Sets Record by Working for Same Company for 84 Years," Bloomberg. May 4, 2022

standardized onboarding process

In my experience as a consultant for Fortune 500 companies, I’ve found that the most effective organizations onboard new hires for the duration of their first year — their most vulnerable period — and focus on three key dimensions: the organizational, the technical, and the social. By using this integrated approach, they enable their employees to stay, and to thrive...

Organizational Onboarding...

• Teach them how things work...
• Help them assimilate...

Technical Onboarding...

• Define what good looks like...
• Set up early wins...

Social Onboarding...

• Build a sense of community...

If you want to retain the talent you spend good money to acquire, make sure a new hire’s first year is positive and productive. Organizations with a standardized onboarding process experience 62% greater new hire productivity, along with 50% greater new hire retention. Those that invest time and effort in their new employees reap the benefits. If you want to be an employer of choice for top talent, make sure a new hire’s organizational, technical, and social needs are well met.

Ron Carucci

"To Retain New Hires, Spend More Time Onboarding Them" Harvard Business Review. Dec. 3, 2018

give employment to the laborer

Men and women of wealth, use your riches to give employment to the laborer! Take the idle from the crowded centres of population and place them on the untilled areas that await the hand of industry. Unlock your vaults, unloose your purses, and embark in enterprises that will give work to the unemployed, and relieve the wretchedness that leads to the vice and crime which curse your great cities, and that poison the moral atmosphere around you. Make others happy, and you will be happy yourselves.

Lorenzo Snow

Pure Religion: The Story of Church Welfare Since 1930 by Glen L. Rudd. 1995. P.365. Originally in Messages of the First Presidency, 3:334