Turn in any direction these days, and you'll trip over people talking about their purpose. This is not a bad thing; it's essential to …
Articles
How good intentions become bad communications
It's 1990, and a Stanford University graduate student in psychology named Elizabeth Newton is using a game to test how people communicate. …
Stop ‘mis-placing’ your brand and put its value to work.
"And then we started the brand work", said the CEO while I listened to her talk about the behind-the-scenes effort to reimagine their …
Your values will benefit from some (productive) tension
Sticking with values, I want to expand on an element of Aristotle's golden mean from my last article. I call it productive tension. Look …
How Aristotle and Buddhism can help define your core values.
Too many conversations about values start by asking are they right or wrong. But for most organisations “How do we use them?” is a more …
A new tool for making promises you can keep
On the bottom shelf of my bookcase, I've got a small library of books and a stack of papers that explore promises and commitments. The …
Put play to work
When an organisation puts a 'fun place to work' in their values, they often mean a games room, funky furniture and kombucha on tap. Not how …
Set your upper bounds and march to success
Taking measured action over and over is decidedly unsexy. Especially given it runs counter to the more common 'splashy launch' mindset. Yet, …
In a game of experience happenstance, you lose.
Experience without expectations is unthinkable — literally. What I believe will happen plays a prominent part in how I feel about what does …
The lost valley of unheroic work
Organisations are made of unheroic work — those thousands of everyday actions and decisions that keep your particular engine turning. Hidden …