(Photo: Flickr user Katherine Lim) Whether it’s a fresh-cooked burger made on your grill, a mini cheeseburger slider from your neighborhood pub, or a classic lettuce-tomato-pickle burger from your favorite fast food chain, chances are you’ve had some type of burger recently. In Datassential’s latest MenuTrends Keynote Report on burgers, we found that three out of four Americans consume at least one burger in any given week. In our extensive report, we showcase key insights on what types of burgers consumers eat most, where they eat them and how operators can get a piece of the burger business. Burgers 101 Being able to grill outside is the top reason consumers eat burgers at home. Otherwise, for the majority of Americans, burgers are an away-from-home affair. The speed and ease of purchasing a burger at a restaurant is the main barrier to at-home consumption, but even so, the majority of consumers still would rather create burgers from scratch at home, versus using frozen or pre-formed patties. With that in mind, retail products that ease in-home preparation could perhaps be the key opportunity to increasing in-home burger consumption. Burgers are available at nearly half of all restaurants, though, making it easy for consumers to prefer eating burgers away from home. Burgers are a highly accessible food for most people - whether it’s a walk to an independent bar to satisfy a burger craving, or a planned trip to a Michelin-starred restaurant. And while full-service restaurants are more likely to serve burgers, the vast majority of away-from-home burgers are actually purchased at limited-service establishments. With their sheer number of locations, national QSRs such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King dominate the burger marketplace and remain top-of-mind choices for consumers. Customization, however, is the most likely factor driving away-from-home consumption - and outside of those traditional QSRs, consumers are turning toward fast-casual better-burger chains. Ultimately, consumers want it all: a reasonably priced, high-quality, made-to-order, customized burger. At Chicago-based Epic Burger, it’s all about letting consumers craft that ultimate burger. Epic’s "more mindful burger" is all-natural, hormone-free, and freshly made. A step-by-step menu allows customers to choose a choice of protein, such as a turkey burger or portobello mushroom; a wheat bun or lettuce-wrapped burger; Wisconsin cheeses like horseradish havarti or aged cheddar; and additions like avocado, pickles and Epic sauce. Let’s also not forget one of the current burger heavy hitters of the fast-casual world, Shake Shack. The Shack’s all-natural burgers have continued to sizzle with consumers — an average Shake Shack now does more than $100,000 in sales a week. Consumers’ favorite burgers When it comes to crafting the best burger, it first starts with great meat. Two-thirds of consumers say having truly great protein is the most important factor for making a truly great burger. The majority of consumers first reach for beef burgers, but alternative forms, like turkey and veggie patties, both are increasing on burger menus. Aside from the main burger patty, some operators are taking proteins to the next level, adding other meats such as pulled pork, brisket, or prosciutto, on top of burgers. When it comes to toppings, consumers typically reach for classics like lettuce, bacon, cheddar, and ketchup. Similar to sandwiches, though, burgers are an extremely versatile format that allow for endless creativity. Take a tour around any city and you’ll likely find at least a few operators finishing burgers with unique toppings, from deep-fried pickles or potato chips, to indulgent items like lobster or foie gras. Offering even a few unique toppings can help operators stand out from the competition while also offering customers a unique, customizable experience. Toppings like cranberry, fruit compotes and specialty peppers, have all been trending up on burger menus. And let’s not forget the consumer craze over sriracha — the spicy condiment has grown 160% on burger menus just over the past year. If you’re looking for an answer to the questions, "What’s the next sriracha?" or "What’s the next big burger trend?" be sure to contact us about the keynote report for consumer and operator data that will keep you on top of burger innovation. The future of burgers There are many ways for operators to get creative with burgers, especially when considering each main component of a burger — the bun, protein, cheese, toppings, and sauces. Mini burgers (sliders) and stuffed burgers are both of high interest consumers. Luxury toppings, such as truffles, have also been trending. Often mixed into an aioli spread on a burger, truffles have grown 400% on burger menus since 2010. Because burgers are so mainstream and ubiquitous across restaurants, it’s important for operators to constantly improve upon their burger products to stay ahead of the curve. By incorporating a choice of next-level toppings such as fontina or bacon jam, or perhaps adding an ethnic flair to burgers, such as menuing a Korean BBQ burger, operators can continue to differentiate themselves from the rest of the burger crowd. Burger innovation is limitless. We’ve already seen burgers made with two bacon grilled cheeses used as a bun (Bernie’s Burger Bus, Houston); burgers stuffed with foie gras, short ribs, and black truffle (DB Bistro Moderne, New York); or colossal burgers topped with a grilled hot dog and Lay’s potato chips (Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s); and there’s no telling what burger creations are on the horizon. One thing’s for sure though: Americans love burgers, and with our MenuTrends Keynote Report, you’ll have access to much more than what we’ve already covered, including what operators menu and what burgers consumers are most excited to bite into. Maeve Webster is the senior director of Datassential, a supplier of trends, analysis and concept testing for the food industry. For more information about ordering the MenuTrends Keynote Burger Report, contact Brian Darr at brian@datassential.com. _________________________________________________ If you enjoyed this article, join SmartBrief’s email list for more stories about the food and beverage industry. We offer 14 newsletters covering the industry from restaurants to food manufacturing. Related Posts: 5 things you need to know about menu boards Prepared foods report: New consumer behaviors hone in on fresh, healthy and sustainable How millennial, retail trends impact breakfast menus, flavors, products — and decisions The race is on to become the "Chipotle of pizza" Solving the messiness of food data Report: The juiciest burger trends and insights originally published by SmartBlogs

Keeping meetings, tight, effective and on-track takes discipline. And meetings that waste time also squander energy, productivity, and money. When you follow these 15 tips you gain respect and buy-in as you run meetings that are valuable, efficient and productive. Hold meetings standing up to capture more excitement and reduce the length of the meeting. Include decision makers so decisions can be finalized at the meeting. Schedule shorter meetings. Aim for 15 minutes. Time limits keep meetings focused on essential topics. TED talks are limited to 18 minutes or less so presenters will carefully organize their thoughts. Research shows we tend to focus well for 10 to 18 minutes before our minds start to wander. Make commitments in addition to decisions. Choose someone to be responsible. Steve Jobs called them DRIS — Directly Responsible Individuals. He ended meetings by assigning tasks and commitments. Issue a clear request and require a verbal buy-in. Don’t allow a non-committal "I’ll try." Assignments give greater accountability and clearer organization. Use a timer to keep track of time and keep you on target. Determine a specific amount of time for each agenda item. When time is up, assign the next steps and move on. Leave cellphones at the door. A Marshall School of Business survey indicates you antagonize co-workers by using cell phones in meetings. 86% find it rude to answer phones in meetings. Essentially when you turn from the meeting to your phone, you waste other’s time and tell them they are less important than your call, text or email. Reduce size of meetings. Try to keep meetings to eight people or fewer. It allows for more creativity and leaves others free to work. Come to the meeting prepared. Expect every attendee to be prepared with data and ready to answer follow up questions. Focus the meeting. American Express executive Christopher Frank has said he asks, "What exactly are we meeting about?" Everyone at the meeting answers in five words or less and so insures all are on the same page. Intel has a sign: "If you don’t know the purpose of your meeting, you are prohibited from starting." Review reoccurring meetings. Are they necessary? Cancel them if there are no agenda items. Cut off ramblers. You know the people who harp on one issue or are slow to get to the point. Create a strategy to deal with them. Condense and restate their point and move on. Write the agenda item as a question. Ask: When will the prototype be ready? Instead of just putting "prototype status" on the agenda. Get buy-in on completed agenda items. If you move ahead too quickly, you may leave some people still thinking about the last point. Ask if everyone is finished with the current topic before you move to the next. Take a two-minute pause. After introducing an idea or problem, encourage deep thinking to arrive at ideas, plans, or solutions by calling for two minutes of silence so participants can think. Set the right tone. Make it clear you are there to solve a problem, not to push your agenda. Be open to input. Talk with participants ahead of time about agenda items and consider their insights as you prepare for your meeting. Follow these 15 steps and you will become known as someone who runs efficient, productive meetings. People will want to attend your meetings because they know you value their time and get results. Joel Garfinkle is recognized as one of the top 50 executive coaches in the U.S., having worked with many of the world’s leading companies, including Oracle, Google, Amazon, Deloitte, The Ritz-Carlton, Gap and Starbucks. He is the author of 300 articles on leadership and seven books, including "Getting Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level." More than 10,000 people subscribe to his Fulfillment@Work newsletter. If you sign up, you’ll receive the free e-book "41 Proven Strategies to Get Promoted Now!" If you enjoyed this article, join SmartBrief’s e-mail list for our daily newsletter on being a better, smarter leader. Related Posts: Be more productive with these tech tips Soothing stress: Taking time for yourself makes you a better leader Lead better meetings with these 2 conversational paths Celebrate mistakes: Creating a culture of forgiveness Why all these meetings? Your checklist for more effective meetings originally published by SmartBlogs

This month, SmartBlog on Education is exploring classroom design and management — just in time for the new school year. In this blog post, Andrew Cohen, a former educator and current CEO of web and mobile-education platform Brainscape, suggests ways to "prevent random ‘rules’ from just sounding like ‘noise.'" Nearly every activity in life — from playing Candy Land, to studying for law school, to learning computer programming — requires us to learn a series of interconnecting rules that comprise a system. One could even argue that the ability to quickly learn how rules fit into systems is the single most important life skill that anyone could develop. Yet our current education system misses a critical step in students’ development of systems-based learning skills. We fail to instill the appropriate purpose that drives students to seek to learn the rules of systems on their own. The rules of a system cannot be taught Webster’s Dictionary defines system as "a coordinated body of methods forming a plan of procedure." When you learn how to speak a language, for example, you are subconsciously synthesizing tens of thousands of vocabulary rules, grammar rules, and voice inflection rules into sentence-building procedures that are commonly accepted by other speakers. The same goes for perfecting the thousands of tiny muscular contractions necessary to become a great basketball player or concert pianist. If we could simply optimize the way that people are able to learn such systems’ rules and synthesize them together, then we could essentially optimize learning itself. The problem with much traditional education is that it attempts to teach individual rules, rather than setting up the conditions for students to learn the rules of the system on their own. This results in drastically reduced student outcomes. It is hard to drill yourself on Spanish verb conjugations (and have that learning truly stick) unless you have first established a goal of learning Spanish. It is torturous to get drilled on factoring polynomials, unless you have first experienced the pain of being unable to solve an important problem without that skill. The rules of a system are best acquired not when they are taught, but when they are learned deliberately. Give learning a purpose In order to prevent random "rules" from just sounding like "noise," parents and educators can first maximize students’ level of interest in those systems. This can be done by starting with a real-world application of the system in action, and making the student feel passionately uncomfortable about their current learning gap. In his book Making Learning Whole, David Perkins refers to this tactic as having students "play the whole game" before diving into any details. For instance, if I hear a beautiful guitar solo (or see a rock star getting lots of attention), I am much more likely to want to learn to play music myself. If I encounter an unfair situation that makes me obsessed with the principle of justice, then I am more likely to want to study law. If I play an engaging game that simulates the exciting career of a real estate tycoon, then I am more likely to want to learn about Finance and compound interest. If a hypothetical friend or hero has a life-threatening illness, I am much more likely to care about the anatomical system that it affects (so we can diagnose and solve the problem). And if I have an exciting real-life startup idea that I want to pitch to (real or mock) investors, then I am more likely to want to learn how to storyboard a great PowerPoint presentation and write a business plan. Of course, not all students will get excited about every subject, no matter how interesting of a scientific mystery is presented in the beginning of a lesson. And we don’t yet live in Sal Khan’s ideal world where students are only required to pursue their strongest areas of interest. But we can at least try to do a better job of creating an initial purpose before diving into any details. Perhaps we first bring in a guest speaker to inspire students about a topic. Or maybe we frame an entire lesson about a fictional story where Sally Career has to go from point A to Z (the "whole game") by learning interim rules and solving smaller problems along the way. Instilling a stronger degree of purpose before learning can make students want to learn, rather than making learning feel like a required form of torture. Constantly move the goalpost As much as possible, educators should strive to make purpose a prerequisite to deeper dives into any topic. If students do not seem fully engaged enough to move on to learning the specific details of a subject, then we might consider spending another day or two of class time focusing on the big picture. Students could potentially spend some more time understanding the career applications of the knowledge, or learning about how some of their favorite celebrities or business moguls have succeeded because they possess the skills in question. Basing instruction around stories makes it more likely to stick with us, so we might as well focus as much class time as possible on engaging students in purposeful stories, while leaving more of the detailed learning up to the students to seek on their own for homework. Once students have begun to establish a decent sense of purpose, educators can begin to introduce challenges of incremental degrees of complexity. Students can start by learning the simplest individual rule (e.g. a G-chord) that accomplishes a microcosm of the overall learning objective (e.g. producing a beautiful harmonic sound). Then little by little, the student should continue learning rules that are just barely outside her current level of understanding — in the so-called zone of proximal development. This system of scaffolding is why we talk to toddlers in simplified "baby talk" (with a clear purpose of communication) and why we begin our math-learning journeys with the simple truism 1+1=2 (so we can tell mom how many cookies we want). Optimizing curriculum Our biggest goal as educators should be to maximize the return on investment (ROI) on students’ time spent learning. And if we know that students will spend less time paying attention (and therefore less time learning) if they are not engaged, we should accordingly spend a disproportionate amount of lesson-planning time on making those first few minutes as engaging as possible. Missing the initial window to engage students’ sense of purpose can otherwise destroy the ROI for the rest of the lesson. Only after establishing a strong purpose and foundation should any specialization, or memorization, ever take place. Perhaps we should delay "studying" until the very end of the learning process! But even though repetition is still the mother of all learning and still is the only way students will ever get great at math, tennis, PhotoShop, or brain surgery, we educators must first ensure that students establish a baseline sense of purpose. Remember: application first, theory & details second. If we do our jobs right, students will seek the most complex layer of knowledge on their own, and we won’t have to "teach" it at all. Andrew Cohen holds a masters degree in Education Technology from Columbia University and worked as a teacher (General Assembly), international economist (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) and government corruption fighter (World Bank). He is the founder of web & mobile education platform Brainscape. Read more: Learn Deliberately, The Zone of Proximal Development and Repetition is the Mother of All Learning Related Posts: Fueling the fire of learning Kindergarten in action: A focus on literacy Implementing the common core: 4 lessons learned for school and district leaders Ready for the learning journey? 20 tenets of responsive leadership How to create a purpose-driven lesson plan originally published by SmartBlogs

Multinational corporations invest more and focus more on high potentials than domestic firms, but does that translate to success?

The 2015 edition of our writing guide simplifies parameters to submit quality content for publication in the CAPS FacultyCare blog. Our prayer is that written content will stir our faculty family to achieve great things...Continue Reading »

:: The Hollywood film industry has a long history of ensuring its products get wide distribution in foreign markets. While foreign sales were once merely "icing on the cake" after local distribution, they now represent a significant portion of total sales. Ensuring strong distribution and sales has led the industry to influence foreign laws regulating film distribution (not always adhering to the letter of the law) and crafting their products to fit into different cultures - ensuring that they cross borders easily. "In Disney-Pixar’s just-released animated feature "Cars 2," which is set in several international locations, "there was originally a Russian villain, but there was concern about that . . . The bad-guy car character was changed to a monocle-wearing German." (Source: LA Times) Action films are particularly suitable for foreign markets, especially if they are based on familiar characters and storylines (cite).  Globally recognized toys (Battleship, 2014; Transformers, 2011, 2014) are used to similar ends. :: Achieving international reach in online higher education has its own challenges. But in the coming years more institutions in the West will seek to leverage their strong brands to reach into foreign markets where growth in student enrolments is far greater. But taking a school "global" via online education is no small feat. There are few precedents to mimic. Open University in the UK is in 107 different nations, but its been working on this since its origins in the 1970s. Most institutions will discover that online higher education - like the campus variety - is still rooted to its location - despite its "anytime, anywhere" sheen. The obstacles to taking a school "global" with online learning include: Brand familiarity. A minority of institutions in North America are well-known outside of their immediate region to prospective students. This is why, for example, education service companies, like 2U and Compass-Embanet - which provide marketing and investment to institutions to build and deliver online programs - tend to seek out partnerships with institutions that are nationally recognized. It’s difficult and expensive to attract students if they aren’t already familiar with the institution. For-profit colleges and universities - which don’t have strong brands - spend a whopping 20-25% of their budgets on marketing.  The configuration of public grants to institutions. Government funding formulas that dictate how much institutions receive for each enrolled student are not always designed in such a way as to make it financially beneficial to the institution to recruit non-local students. One jurisdiction I’ve worked in requires that the institution reimburse the government for every international student enrolled.  The need to serve "our" students first. Institutions that receive direct public support are often expected to treat students from that jurisdiction as a priority. While institutions base their value to a certain degree on their ability to bring together a diverse student body, and these practices are thought to support the region’s broader immigration objectives, no institution wants to be seen as turning its back on the children of its tax-base/constituency.  The value of credentials. On the "demand side" of the equation, credentials offered by institutions don’t always hold their value in other settings.  There are other factors, of course, such as cultural differences, and the challenges of hiring local staff and faculty in other jurisdictions (particularly if your institution is unionized). But the pull of achieving international reach is too great for many academic leaders, and the nature of technology makes it seem all within reach. At the same time, we appear to be at the start of a period in which certain types of education are breaking free of the limits of location. Commercial providers like Lynda.com (recently bought by Linked In for 1.5 billion) have international ambitions. Online language training - the largest single type of instruction - continues to attract money and talent. And MOOC providers like Udacity and Coursera demonstrated the extraordinary interest of international students in lifelong learning. These kinds of education providers are less restricted by structural factors such as the value of credentials, government funding formulas, and the like. Like action films from Hollywood, they cross borders with relative ease. :: The ability to serve a broader range of students in different locations is highly dependent on the degree to which the curriculum is relevant in other jurisdictions. We’ll look at this issue directly in an upcoming post.

An Every Classroom Matters Episode with Garnet Hillman How do we know our students have really mastered the standards we are supposed to teach? Assessment coach Garnett Hillman helps us understand how our assessments need to change. (We might even learn that we don’t have to grade so much and get better results.) We learn the tools and tips to help us with assessments. Important Takeaways What are the most common mistakes teachers make when assessing students? How can you improve your current assessments to better meet standards? Why should formative assessments be more reflective? Why just giving number grades as feedback doesn’t work and what to do instead. How to give feedback that helps students the most. How can you grade less and get better results? Interview Links @Garnet_hillman Sponsor Help Teaching.com has a test maker that will help you with your assessments. You can find questions by: grade level, subject, and Common Core standards. Try the Help Teaching Test Maker(tm). Try the Free Helpteaching.com Test Maker(tm) Now You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. Join the Every Classroom Matters Awesome Educators Network on Facebook The post 7 Assessment Tips and Tools to Know What Your Students Are Really Learning appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog.

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