You know the power of compounding. When you reinvest the interest on your investment, your return grows over time. Atomic Habits author James Clear discussed compound return of 1% habits at his Growth Faculty event in Melbourne this week. Describing how a daily 1% improvement in a habit will compound to...
Failing to communicate isn't entirely accurate. What mostly happens are well-intentioned if clumsy attempts that land as overly wordy, inadvertently patronising and jargon-filled information. And over and again, those efforts routinely fail to get any message across. Which is ironic given the roots of the word. Communicate emerged in the 1500s...
Do this.Start that.Add another idea.Layer a different process.All around is the quest for more. Bigger, different, shiny things to transport whatever you're doing to the next level or a new place.But is more the answer?Try this.Do less. Scale back and instead inspect what's happening now for places you can stop...
Hands up if you have a ‘to-do’ list. I suspect nearly everyone does. Now hands up if you have a ‘done’ list. Fewer if any, hands in the air. Me among you. I stumbled upon the idea last week from Oliver Burkeman, a favourite thinker about how to use our...
When a brand’s store of value overflows, there’s usually an undercurrent of I care about what you care about going on between me and you. It shows up in both the promises made and agreed upon.Within those same promises is a contract called ‘what we owe each other’. In his...
Forbes Magazine describes the idea of staff engagement as “the emotional commitment the employee has to the organisation and its goals”.And organisations’ desire for that commitment often kicks off a slew of things designed to motivate people and measure how they’re doing.But those motivations and measures are distant from people’s...
The continuing effort to keep values in balance tempts many organisations to measure and manage them in people’s performance and behaviours. Judging whether they’re holding the value or not.But there is a different way to keep values on track, so they contribute to the brand. One that allows for their...
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 individual and group endeavours.Yet, when I look past the virtue signals of purpose-led this and purposeful that, I struggle to see how people put it to...
It’s 1990, and a Stanford University graduate student in psychology named Elizabeth Newton is using a game to test how people communicate. She’s assigned students roles of ‘tappers’ and ‘listeners’ and asked the tappers to pick a well-known song and tap the song on a table. Next, the listeners have to...
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 under the covers of successful organisations, and you will find tension at work. No, I’m not talking about “this place sucks” hostility.You can most commonly find my kind of...
