The Most Generous Company in the World
Dan Wooldridge looks at two articles that describe the generosity of Wal-Mart and it’s impact on lifting the standard of living of people and communities. The articles suggest the idea that Wal-Mart might deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.
Cohesion is the force with which the molecules of a body cleave together. In a company, cohesion represents the pulling together (and keeping together) of the employees. To have cohesion, employees must know “who belongs” and “who is not one of us.” In a living company, cohesion and diversity exist together. The company is clearly a unit, with a single identity; but the people and substructures within that unit show a rich variety. They are composed differently from each other; they have different characteristics and different potential. But they are all part of a cohesive whole.Arie De Geus
The Living Company - Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment, (p. 104), Longview Publishing Limited
Crystal and my partners at Starbucks, like Kester and Charlie, had given me a chance to work and live and see things a new way. The least I could do was to help them by not reverting to my old, prideful, control-freak self. Yes, I had to admit, I had been a control freak, just as much as Ford or any other client. I had loved ordering people to work overtime or change a headline or even bring me a cup of coffee….I had been a bad boss. It was time to be a real good Partner. I promised myslef that I would not get so pumped up with ambition or a crazy self-righteous pride in anything I did that I lost my perspective again. I had a picture of letting my old life go, like you would discard a damp and smelly pair of old swimming trunks. I had traded my pin-striped suit for a green apron. A Master of the Universe costume for something that said was there to serve - not to rule. You can’t serve if you try to control the people you serve, I realized. I wasn’t some know-it-all authority, a pompous lifeguard ordering people around on the beach. I was just another swimmer, now riding a wave I’d never known existed.Michael Gates Gill
How Starbucks Saved My Life , (p. 175-176), Gotham Books, 2007
A Quick Guide for the Bewildered
Dan Wooldridge recommends a quick guide to new media and social media for InsideWork readers.
The Perfect Setting for Hope
Dan Wooldridge notes that the romanticized and consumerized modern views of Christmas obscure the raw reality of the first Christmas. But in that reality there is true hope.
Pretending to be Interested
Dan Wooldridge urges us to be clear and honest in managing expectations of those who send email as well as our own as we head off for the holidays or vacation. It’s a matter of truly respecting people.
All people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else.
Tyler Cowen
Marginal Revolution, 12/10/2008
Telling the Story to Our World
Dan Wooldridge explains how the first authors who chronicled the life of Christ provide a model to communicating to diverse global cultures and the next generation.
A Christmas Meditation, Part 1
Dan Wooldridge writes that the phenomena of a flat world is not new. The global Roman Empire created a flat world that was the setting for the first Christmas.
A Lesson from the Great Beer Crisis of 2008
Dan Wooldridge points to the remarkable examples of Boston Beer and Sierra Nevada Brewing as an illustration of a biblical perspective on loving your “enemies”, that is, your competition.
Rejecting the Commercialization, Returning to Relationship
Dan Wooldridge recommends the video on the Advent Conspiracy to challenge the commercialization of Christmas.
Today’s best young employees, the ones on whom future success will depend, are demanding that employers help make them better performers. It seems that young people understood the new nature of today’s economy before a lot of CEOs did, and they insist on employers who will keep developing them. Geoff Colvin
Talent is Overrated , (p. 127), Portfolio, 2008
Move from Intention to Action
Dan Wooldridge at InsideWork notes that the greatest risk is in inaction. Avoid the mistake of always intending to do something and not doing it, of always preparing and never launching.
Dan Wooldridge points us to Jason van Genderen’s “Mankind Is No Island” to make us pause and reflect on whether we love a place or its people. In our self preoccupation do we notice, see, hear, and respond to those around us compassionately?
It is quite saddening to think of those people who have been mistreated by history. There were the poetes maudits, like Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Rimbaud, scorned by society and later worshipped and force-fed to schoolchildren. (There are even schools named after high school dropouts.) Alas, this recognition came a little late for the poet to get a serotonin kick out of it, or to prop up his romantic life on earth. But there are even more mistreated heroes - the very sad category of those who we do not know were heroes, who saved our lives, who helped us avoid disasters. They left no traces and did not even know that they were making a contribution. We remember the martyrs who died for a cause that we knew about, never those no less effective in their contribution but whose cause we were neer aware of - precisely because they were successful. Our ingratitude toward the poetes maudits fades completely in front of this other type of thanklessness. This is a far more vicious kind of ingratitude: the feeling of uselessness on the part of the silent hero.Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Black Swan , ( xxii-xxiii ), Random House, 2007
Doing 4% less does not get you 4% less.
Doing 4% less may very well get you 95% less.
That’s because almost good enough gets you nowhere. No sales, no votes, no customers. The sad lie of mediocrity is the mistaken belief that partial effort yields partial results. In fact, the results are usually totally out of proportion to the incremental effort.
Big organizations have the most trouble with this, because they don’t notice the correlation. It’s hidden by their momentum and layers of bureaucracy. So a mediocre phone rep or a mediocre chef may not appear to be doing as much damage as they actually are.
The flip side of this is that when you are at the top, the best in the world, the industry leader, a tiny increase in effort and quality can translate into huge gains. For a while, anyway.
Seth Godin
Seth Godin’s Blog , 11/7/2008
