It’s Harder to be Kind than Clever

256 comments on a 500 word blog about kindness which was posted on Harvard Business Review – these are a lot of comments about a topic that doesn’t seem like a business leadership topic. In the blog, Bill Taylor, author of Mavericks at Work, relates the following story about Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com.

Even as a 10-year-old boy, it turns out, Bezos had a passion for crunching numbers. During a summer road trip with his grandparents, Jeff got fed up with his grandmother’s smoking in the car and decided to do something about it. From the backseat, he calculated how many cigarettes per day his grandmother smoked, how many puffs she took per cigarette, the health risk of each puff, and announced to her with great fanfare, “You’ve taken nine years off your life!” (more…)

Weekend Thought

 

“The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.”

- Ralph Nichols

The Value of Generosity

A recent Harvard Business Review blog, “The Generosity Strategies that Help Companies Grow” points out how companies can increase consumer loyalty and long-term profit by offering free services that their customers really use.  The message is “Consumers tend to respond in kind when they are treated generously and with respect for something they value.” The writer continually equates generosity with money and believes that a company spending a little money to be generous brings in profit later on.

When we think of generosity, the author’s definition and society’s prevailing definition attaches it to being generous with a measurable capital like time or money.  But, looking at the definition for generosity, we come up with synonymous such as unselfish, bighearted, magnanimous, and benevolent. These synonyms take generous from something that has to do with capital to a word that describes behavior that is good for us and the others around us.  We enjoy being around an unselfish person and  believe that selfishness is such a negative quality that we try to develop our children into unselfish people. We develop “customer loyalty” to those who are unselfish because we believe they treat us equitably. (more…)

Weekend Thought

“Start with changing behaviors, not mindsets. It is much easier to ‘act your way into new thinking’ than to ‘think your way into new actions.’ Recurring and consistent performance results from behavior change will lead to lasting changes in the way people feel, think, and believe in the long run.”

– Jon Katzenbach, Booz&Co.

Quality Hours Instead of Quantity Hours: How to Build Trust by Changing Your Idea of the Clock

Does Ford’s 40 hours per week production schedule that worked for cranking out Model T on an assembly line work for the your 21^st century business where shared knowledge creation, and not amount of Model T’s mark a company’s success?  Ilya Pozin asks this question in his Linkedin post, “Why Employees Shouldn’t Have Hours.”

Management innovation requires looking at long held workplace traditions to see if they still fit your needs for today’s company. One long-standing tradition is the 40-hour workweek. The 40-hour workweek is a carryover from the times that industrial, factory production was the operating goal of companies. The employees clocked in every morning, did their eight hours on the assembly line and clocked out in the evening. Meeting production goals was determined by calculating the number of employee hours used to produce x number of widgets. Today, though, production goals are fluid. Employees are not assembling widgets that take a specified amount of minutes as they roll down the assembly line. Today’s employees develop then create projects that need varying amounts of time. For example, running sales figures may encompass the sales figures themselves and a report on the trends outside the company that affect the sales’ figures as well as customer comments and recommendations. Overall, it is a product that takes varying amounts of time to produce, rather than a product that will take the same amount of time to produce each time. (more…)

Weekend Thought

 

“Individuals play the game, but teams beat the odds.” 

-SEAL Team Saying

The New Trick Advertising Executives Need To Learn

This is a guest post provided by Good Vibe Agency

Our desires are growing but not just for greater quantities of things as in the past. What we are experiencing now is a shift in the quality of our desires. So what do people really want now instead of this endless consumption? A feeling of happiness that is less and less dependent on material things. We are transitioning to a more virtual realm where a feeling of lacking something and a feeling of what can fill us are up in the air nowadays. People are searching for pure feelings that are not dressed up in the form of some pretty object. They want to receive pleasure according to this new lacking arising in them. (more…)