It's Just Our Culture

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Does your company know why it does what it does? Is there a good reason for all of the policies you follow? In most organizations, the answer to both of these questions is no. Here’s a test. Open up your HR manual and look at the section on sick days or paid time off. How many days do you get off for sickness? Can you use that time to take care of a family member or for a “mental health” day? Do you need a doctors approval to return to work?
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Push Decisions to the Edge

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This last Saturday I stopped for a bagel. I went to the bagel chain named after a relatively smart guy. I ordered an everything bagel with chive cream cheese, my favorite! I then asked if they had chai and the clerk said, “All we have is coffee.” I looked up at the wall and from the list there I ordered an iced mocha. I’ve been doing the low carb thing and wanted a treat - Saturday is my cheat day. The clerk replied again, “All we have is coffee.” I pointed to the wall, with a confused dog look on my face, and he told me that, “corporate made them put the sign up even though they can’t make any of those fancy drinks and won’t let them take it down.”
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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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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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Corporations, our Psychopathic Citizens

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Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by an abnormal lack of empathy combined with strongly amoral conduct, masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal. In the US, corporations, limited liability corporations, and other types of a business have a clear common goal, to make a profit. That is their primary, and in many cases their sole purpose. While corporations have been assigned many of the rights given to US citizens, such as first and fourteenth amendment rights, they are certainly lacking in empathy and I think it’s fair to say that many corporations act amorally.
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You Mean I Don't Have to be Dumb?

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Is your IQ fixed? Can anyone learn to play the violin or compete in a triathlon? Is a paticular gift a requirement to learn these things? It turns out that intelligence, sports ablity, music ablity, just about any ability can be learned, according to 25 years of research by Carol Dweck a former Columbia and current Stanford Psychologist. You are what you think. Perception is reality.
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