Happy Friday!
What do Inflation, Annuities, Leadership, and job charts have in common?
Nothing… outside of being in this week’s quick hits!
Have a great weekend,
Here are your Quick Hits:
Good Leaders Know You Can’t Fight Reality
- The ability to accept reality is one of the most useful, and most misunderstood, skills for a leader.
- Apple’s Steve Jobs, whose reputation for pushing people to do the impossible has become the stuff of legends. Jobs is reported to have distorted his employees’ sense of scale, making them believe that an unachievable task was possible — dubbed the “Reality Distortion Field” by his colleagues.
- If you have someone on your team who, after an appropriate effort in training, coaching, and development, still doesn’t meet your expectations, there is a decision to be made. You can either accept that they have value to your business exactly as they are, or you can let them go. Where I see the most frustration and lack of productive effort is in constantly investing time, money, and energy into employees in the hopes they will turn in to different people or develop new skills when they’ve demonstrated over and over that neither are happening.
Historical Returns Distort the Analysis of Annuities
- Solid article from the head of Morningstar’s Retirement research reiterates using historical rates on illustrations isn’t a reliable indicator of future performance.
- Also does a great job explaining the impact of bond yields on option pricing thus effecting pars and caps.
U.S. consumer spending increases; inflation eroding households’ buying power
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Spending up, but so is inflation.
- “With inflation high, real disposable income dropped 0.3% after increasing 0.7% in July. The saving rate fell to a still-high 9.4% from 10.1% in July.”
Look to Wink’s 2nd Quarter Report on Deferred annuity sales
“INDEXED ANNUITY sales for the second quarter were $16.6 billion; up 14.5% when compared to the previous quarter, and up 29.9% when compared with the same period last year.”
The 20 Fastest Growing Jobs in the Next Decade
