The status of your business today is a direct consequence of the questions company leaders have been asking for the last several years. Questions direct the future. Better quality questions produce better quality results. Knowing what questions to ask, and when, is a skill. The more you...
Do you notice that setbacks tend to occupy your mind more than victories?
Do you sometimes struggle to stay positive about your business?
Employees expect their leaders to be enthusiastic, energetic, and positive about the future. But on a day-to-day basis, maintaining a positive outlook and inspiring others can be challenging.
Even if everything in your business is going smoothly, a problematic issue in your personal life—with your spouse, child, friend, or relative—can throw you off your game.
Leaders must inspire their people amidst professional and personal challenges. Research-based methods for counteracting negativity and fostering optimism give leaders the resources to inspire themselves and uplift others.
How can you inspire others if you don’t feel inspired?
This reminds me of a (possibly apocryphal) story I heard about a shoe company back in the 1800s that sent a couple of their employees to a distant land for a month to scout the region and determine the market opportunity there. One of the employees came back and said, “Nobody there wears shoes! There’s no opportunity there!” The other employee came back a week later and said, “Nobody there wears shoes! There’s so much opportunity there!”Tony Hsieh[1. The Employees of Zappos and Mark Dagostino, The Power of WOW: How to Electrify Your Work and Life by Putting Service FIrst, 2019.]
Like many people in the business world, I was saddened to hear of the passing of Tony Hsieh last week. Not only did I have a lot of respect for Tony, but I was fortunate to call him a friend.
If you ever met Tony, you’d know he was definitely like the second employee in the story he recounted. Tony saw potential everywhere, not just in businesses, but also in people. Whether it was empowering Zappos employees to pursue their passion projects or listening to an artist friend around a campfire in the yard near his airstream, Tony saw possibility where others would just see half-baked ideas.
If someone told you your company is a cult, how would you take it?
Instead of getting offended, you may want to feel a sense of pride. It all depends on how you look at cults and the role they play in creating your corporate culture.
Your customers are human beings. Your employees are human beings. And yes, you are human too.
But what does it mean to be human?
As humans, we are conscious of certain names, dates, memories, beliefs, concepts, and aspects of our identity.
This collection of details are all above the surface. They are available to our conscious minds, retrievable by our thinking brains.
Below the surface, however, a vast reservoir of energy and instincts exists of which humans are not aware. Psychology calls this subterranean the subconscious mind and the unconscious mind.
Businesses that succeed in the long-term have leaders with a long-term perspective. They have an inspired vision. They can see the latent potential in their people and within the enterprise itself.
The customer is vital to the actualization of this vision. Ideally, the customer is at the heart of it.
“Good morning city!”
Emmet Brickowski was a construction worker, your everyday guy. He followed printed instructions on how to fit in, have everyone like him, and always be happy.
But Emmet had a greater destiny: to become a Master Builder. Master Builders don’t have to follow instructions. Inspired by others, they create from what’s inside of them.
If you don’t know Emmet, you may have heard of The Lego Movie. The Lego Movie premiered in February 2014, grossing $468 million worldwide at the box office.
Again, it is well that you should often leave off work and take a little relaxation, because, when you come back to it you are a better judge; for sitting too close at work may greatly deceive you. Again, it is good to retire to a distance because the work looks smaller and your eye takes in more of it at a glance and sees more easily the discords or disproportion in the limbs and colours of the objects.Leonardo Da Vinci[1. Leonardo Da Vinci, “Of Judging Your Own Pictures,” The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci Complete, translated by John Paul Richter, 1883.]
When things are busy or stressful, it’s easy to get caught up in the doing and lose perspective. And, when you lose perspective, it’s hard to connect your day-to-day actions with what you desire over the long-term
Here are three ways taking a break can help you achieve long-term success.
Achieving your company's vision requires having everyone in the organization working towards achieving that goal. Here are ten ways to inspire people in your organization on the way to achieving your company's vision.
Why are we drawn into stories about adventures? What is our fascination with journeys traveled by characters like Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen or Washington crossing the Delaware or the fabulously named Rough Riders?
Mythology expert Joseph Campbell tells us that these adventures are all part of the hero’s journey—a schema laid out in his ground-breaking book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The heroic quest predates written language and its primary structure can help guide teams through massive changes. This story structure is all but hardwired into the human brain: We tell stories this way because stories that follow this pattern release transformative psychological power.