Today is “environment day” in our continuing overview of Robert Sutton’s Weird Ideas That Work. Once you have hired the right people, how should you manage them? Weird Idea 4: Encourage People to Ignore and Defy Superiors and Peers (PS – That’s even if you’re their “superior”!!!!) “Jeffrey Pfeffer likes to say that managers should… Read More
In continuing our overview of Robert Sutton’s Weird Ideas That Work, let’s talk about people. “Driving out variation makes sense when organizations do proven things in proven ways that still work…When innovation is the goal, however, organizations need variations in what people do, think about, and produce.” We also need variation in who we hire! … Read More
In 2002, Robert Sutton published the book Weird Ideas That Work: 11 ½ Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation. His ideas, perspective and style immediately got my attention. It was the first time I read anything that described creativity and innovation with phrases like: “You just need to be skilled and motivated at gathering… Read More
I’ve been meaning to read two books by Mihaly Csikentmihalyi (pronounced Mee-high CHICK-sent-me-high-ee), an American psychologist, for about 6 months now. One is Flow and the other is Creativity. I first heard about Flow in the Fast Company article The Art of Work, by Ann Marsh. She writes that flow is “… a condition… Read More
Earlier this month, Steve Farber stopped by and made a comment on one of The Change Resistors posts. As I result I visited his blog and ended up reading his first book, The Radical Leap: A Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership. The Radical Leap is a business parable about Extreme Leadership. Leap stands for: Love, Energy,… Read More
When I came back from the Seth Godin seminar on June 15th, I said I would publish my authentic story here by June 30th. Well, I’m not quite done yet! During my quest to define my authentic story, I ran across a video that Guy Kawasaki posted about his book The Art of the… Read More
Well this is it! We’re on the last Concept Age sense from Dan Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind – Meaning. Meaning is purpose. It’s spirituality. As Dan writes, referring to a study done by the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, “Most of the executives defined spirituality in much the same way… Read More
In this continuing series on Dan Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind, we’ve been reviewing what Dan refers to as the six senses of the Concept Age. To date, we’ve covered Story, Design, Empathy, and Play. The last two senses are Symphony and Meaning. Dan characterizes symphony as the ability to see relationships between… Read More