You have heard of road rage - the behavior of unstable motorists who react to adversity on the roadway with all the aplomb of a toddler. How do you respond when similar rude and aggressive actions get played out at work?

As job stress mounts, rude behavior at the workplace is becoming altogether too common. Sometimes the rage culture is set by a manager who chooses not to treat his or her employees with common respect. I was a guest at a sales meeting not long ago where the manager berated his sales staff for missing their targets. "If your marriage is not in trouble, it's probably because you are not spending enough time on the road doing your job!" he yelled at top volume. While my jaw dropped to the ground at such naked disrespect, the members of the sales team shifted in their chairs uncomfortably.

Hospitals cannot afford to deliver patient care.

That statement sounds like an oxymoron, but it conveys the true struggle for health care providers today.

Let's be honest, the same goes for most any business. Customer service has become an endangered species on the expense line. I like the way that Carol Hymowitz phrased it in the title for her Wall Street Journal column this past week: "Everyone Likes to Laud Serving the Customer; Doing It Is the Problem."

Some of the most creative ideas, indeed the most promising business plans, never see the light of day due to poor presentation.

Just this week I witnessed a murder by inept delivery. A services company was pitching the key decision makers at a transnational company on what was truly a dynamic leadership development program. Rather than jump straight to the point, and describe what they would do and how it would result in better company leaders, the pitch men got lost. They opened with a PowerPoint presentation, and took 25 minutes to review general "leadership theory" that lay at the foundation of their leadership program. Honestly, their lesson on leadership theory offered concepts that reasonably well-informed managers already accepted. No surprise, the decision makers soon got bored, looked at their Blackberry messages, and had that look of a prisoner plotting an escape. By the time the pitch men got to the exciting part of their program, malaise already had set in.

I was leafing through a copy of Forbes recently, and an article caught my eye: "Treating HIV Doesn't Pay." The tagline was equally jarring: "It is humane to pay for AIDS drugs in Africa, but it isn't economical. The same dollars spent on prevention would save more lives."

The piece penned by Emily Oster, a graduate student of economics at Harvard, applies an economic cost-benefit analysis to a serious social crisis. She pits pouring resources into antiretroviral therapy that may save individual lives against a preventative strategy that would arrest the spread of the epidemic.