Trying to put a little more living into life. Organisational Behaviour professor focusing on #Engagement, #Leadership, and #PositivePsychology @LBS
London, England
Joined June 2012
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Intrapreneurship is more than a hackathon, which can often be theatrical instead of real culture change that catalyses sustained value creation. Thanks @Dlancefield strategy-business.com/articl…
“The pernicious effects of the self-interest theory have been most disturbing…By encouraging us to expect the worst in others it brings out the worst in us: dreading the role of the chump, we are often loath to heed our nobler instincts.”
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When change is “done to me” it can be debilitating. When I choose the change it can be exhilarating.
If people are motivated towards the change in a change process, everything else becomes easier. All the time & effort we invest early in that change process, engaging people, listening & co-producing, pays off later in better, more sustainable change. Trying to short-cut engagement means doing change "to" or "for" people & that's usually a bad move. Graphic: @anafabrega11
You might think that impressing your boss means hiding your mistakes and perhaps trying to fix them on your own. But that isn’t true. Learning organizations are ones that accept that not everything will go according to plan—and some of the things that go wrong will be human error
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This is interesting: “When the economy was warm, executives thought, ‘I’d really like to have people back but it’s OK because I have this margin of error…Now that things are tougher, they want to hunker down and have their people in the office.” Like “RTO for when work matters.”
Emma this tweet and the article are wonderful Rorschach tests! The responses crack me up. The emerging evidence from @I_Am_NickBloom @tsedal and others is bit more nuanced than the black and white assertions.
“Instead of learning from failures, many executives seek to keep them hidden or to pretend that they were all part of a master plan and no big deal. An extraordinarily valuable corporate resource is being wasted if learning from failures is inhibited.”
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”
The building blocks of personhood – Oliver Sacks on narrative as the pillar of identity themarginalian.org/2018/01/1…
Writing and expression isn’t a contest, but a doorway.
Read on if you’re curious about writing for wellbeing. Midsummer workshops start next week.
litsalon.co.uk/2023/06/20/wr…
“The mystery of what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of changes is one of the most interesting questions of philosophy.”
Still the best thing ever written about the art of growing older brainpickings.org/2015/09/03…
“Runnin' Down A Dream."
We can’t sit around and wait for someone to drop a dream job in front of us. Instead, like Lin-Manuel, we need to run it down. We need to hire ourselves first.
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"The more leverage that firms have (in terms of being a destination employer or, in the case of banking, the salary they pay), the more they are insisting on co-ordinated office time." @brucedaisley says it looks like there’s life in the office yet. makeworkbetter.substack.com/…
This is really cool Rob, thank you for sharing. Is there one key difference that the thrivers are doing the “hardly surviving” are not doing ?
For roughly a century our approach to management was conventionally hierarchical. That made sense because work was organized sequentially and in silos, jobs were fixed, workspaces were physical, and information flowed downward. That’s no longer the case. hbr.org/2022/03/managers-can…
"Recall that before the pandemic those people who stayed at home during the working week were in general considered to be shirking." @lyndagratton hsm-advisory.com/wp-content/…
“Getting packaged as a Cinderalla story is a lagging indicator of many, many years of focus and hard work.”
In 2016, Pharrell Williams visited an N.Y.U. music production class to critique student songs.
After he listened to a song called “Alaska” by a student named Maggie Rogers, Pharrell said, “Wow. I have zero, zero, zero notes for that.”
“And I'll tell you why” he said. Because...
“You're doing your own thing. It's singular. It's like when the Wu-Tang Clan came out—no one could really judge it. You either liked it or you didn't, but you couldn't compare it to anything else.
And that is such a special quality, and all of us possess that ability.”
Takeaway 1:
The source of your power, Robert Greene says, is your uniqueness.
We say of genius, as Pharrell said of Rogers' song:
"They're 1 of a kind."
"They're singular."
So are you, Robert likes to point out: No one has ever had your DNA, your experiences, your perspective.
Embrace your uniqueness. Express it in your work.
Takeaway 2:
The video with Pharrell went viral & Maggie Rogers, seemingly overnight, was a pop star.
But…
Rogers started playing music when she was 7. She started songwriting a few years later. In high school, she attended courses at the Berklee College of Music. During her senior year, she recorded her first album, which is what got her accepted to the N.Y.U. music school and the opportunity to play one of her songs in front of Pharrell.
As Rogers later said of the viral video, “My many, many years of focus and hard work got kind of packaged into a Cinderella story.”
Ryan Holiday's line is, "All success is a lagging indicator."
All success is a function of the previous work put in.
“When a day’s writing goes well,” Ryan writes, “it’s a lagging indicator of hours and hours spent researching and thinking…Hitting a personal record on the bench press is a lagging indicator of a lot of discipline and hard work. Receiving a promotion is a lagging indicator of a lot of quality work. Delivering a keynote with confidence is a lagging indicator of a lot of preparation.”
Getting packaged as a Cinderalla story is a lagging indicator of many, many years of focus and hard work.
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“It seems to me that each of us expressing our own originality is the essence of our art and professionalism.” — Jim Henson
Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!
“People have greater respect for those with an innate gift than for those who have had to strive for their success.” Especially narcissists, about themselves. @skesebir
“If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all,” Michelangelo reportedly said
My latest piece for @BBC_Worklife looks at “naturalness bias” bbc.com/worklife/article/202…
“The ability to endure suffering and hardship is critical for our success, but it’s equally critical to recognize the toll that endurance takes, and take steps to protect ourselves and our teams — before our passion burns us out.”
In this new @HarvardBiz we discuss our recent paper showing that passion can lead to burnout—and highlight strategies employees can adopt for themselves, and managers need to integrate to support their team's passion
hbr.org/2023/05/dont-let-pas…
w/ @kkrttr @JirsMeuris @JBredehorst
Bottom line: it’s extremely difficult to instill purpose in others. Overblown or insincere methods can backfire, triggering cynical reactions. What works better is helping people see their impact on others, and helping them develop a story about why they care about what they do.
If you want employees to genuinely “get” their organisations' purpose, put them in direct contact with the people they serve is the advice of @LBS’ @DanCable1 whose book Alive at Work addresses how leaders can help their teams to feel purpose. ow.ly/VJtb50OofqH
“Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.”
This should be on the wall of every newsroom and every classroom and every living room: The Baloney Detection Kit – Carl Sagan's timeless tenets of bullshit-busting and critical thinking themarginalian.org/2014/01/0…
