Books are one of my favourite things—ebooks, audiobooks, paper and ink books. I love diving into people’s ideas and thinking because, in turn, they get me thinking in new ways, inspire more than a few of my articles and often wind their way into my work. Meetings with me will...
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...
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 worthy and useful question.I’ll go further. It’s the only question that truly matters. And I’m not talking about laundry lists of behaviours for doing this...
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 authors ramble at length about the moral foundations and legal consequences of making, keeping and breaking promises. Yet, beyond the examples they use, none provide tools...
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 they carry out the unheroic work living beneath the trappings.The Play Ethic author Pat Kane says play “Helps release thoughts that are locked in...