ROWE and City Planning

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If more and more people start working from home, what affect will that have on our cities and communities? Will our need for office space decrease? Will traffic lesson, will we need less parking spaces in business districts? Will it strengthen or weaken our relationships at home or at work? Certainly there will be consequences for changing the way we work. Some of them intended, lower cost for office space, higher employee engagement and satisfaction, some of them unintended. What will the unintended consequences be?
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The Myth of Pursuing Happiness

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Are you trying to find happiness and success? According to Dr. Viktor Frankl, you can’t pursue them directly. You can only find them as a byproduct of other things. Dr. Frankl, a survivor of four Nazi Germany concentration camps, a neurologist and a psychiatrist developed a new field of psychiatry just prior to being sent to the camps. He had travel papers that would have let him leave Germany for the US but since his parents didn’t have a way to leave Germany, he chose to stay.
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Nature vs Nurture in the Realm of Success

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What makes our top achievers in business, sports or music great at what they do? Is it something they’re born with? Is it an overbearing parent pushing them to succeed? Is it hard work? Most of us think that talent is something we’re born with, that you either have it or you don’t. We think that how smart someone is determines their potential. Not so much. Sure, some people have inherited advantages in rare cases, but these advantages being smarter, stronger, taller etc, have little to no relation to how successful someone will be.
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Monoculture is Death

If life is diversity, then monoculture is death, if not just dead boring. Can you say potato famine? Up to 1.5 million people dead, because of a monoculture! With crops, companies or cultures, lack of diversity is never a good idea. My girlfriend is a foodie and we were watching a Michael Pollan documentary, The Botany of Desire a few nights ago. I learned that 99.9 % of apple orchards, in the west, are monocultures, they don’t grow from seeds, they grow from cloning – watch the movie or read the book if you want to know more. We have similar issues with potatoes; most potatoes in the US are the same strain. Why is this bad?
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Innovation is a Virus

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We have been told by patent holders, mostly large corporations, that intellectual property rights encourage innovation. Copyright laws have been extended from 14 years to up to life plus 70 years. Competition is said to accelerate creativity. Do these ideas serve innovation or corporate greed?
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Are You at Your Best?

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Do you strive to get better at what you do? Whether it’s fixing cars, selling shoes or programming computers? Or are you already at your best? Getting better at something you care deeply about is called personal mastery. Peter Senge in his book, The Fifth Discipline says,” Personal mastery goes beyond competence and skills, though it is grounded in competence and skills…
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Fear, What is it Good For?

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What Are You Afraid Of? I spend very little time being afraid. It’s not a good or bad thing, just the way I’m wired. I’m not afraid of being hurt or dying. Not afraid of heights, crowds, spiders, water or anything else I can think of in the physical world. I used to have a fear of success and a fear of being alone. The former I got rid of in my mid 20’s, the later in the last few years. At least I thought I’d gotten rid of my fear of success.
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Power to the People!

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How do we create a tipping point for interest in Motivation 3.0? What if we could create an open source project of people willing to teach and help each other about how we can have meaningful, fulfilling, fun and nurturing work lives that resulted in companies that were more profitable and sustainable? What would that look like? How would it work? Has this problem been solved in another field?
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Unarticulated Needs

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Filling needs that people don’t know they have is hard. Earlier this week I read a blog post that Seth Godin wrote about: Marketing to the bottom of the pyramid. It got me thinking, that that’s what I’m trying to do, fulfill unarticulated needs. Needs that most folks don’t know they have. The average person doesn’t know that they could have a work life that lifts them up and makes them feel great. For that last 100 years we’ve been programmed to believe that work is a necessary evil, that we need to give up 40-60 hour of our week to purgatory, that being happy, fulfilled and engaged at work is more of a fairy tale than a reality.
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