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There’s a pub on my street with a sidewalk chalkboard that reads: There’s no problem a happy hour won’t fix. Now that’s some good copywriting. Hope they get lots of customers. Because they’re not completely wrong. Hanging out with friends at a bar and drinking our sorrows away has been one of humanity’s most effective coping mechanisms for thousands of years. What’s kind of spooky, though, is when this…

Most email programs have something called a delay send functionality. This allows you to write your message now, and have it sent at a later date and time, rather than going out immediately. Productivity experts say it increases your average open rate by timing an email for peak work hours. Pretty cool trick, huh? And yet, the most fascinating part of this feature is, certain employees will use it…

Gallup’s recent study of over seven thousand full time employees found about two thirds of workers experience burnout on the job. They claim organizations are facing an employee burnout crisis. Do you agree with that number? Or are you more like me, in that you question whether people understand what the term burnout really means? The official diagnosis of professional burnout, according to the international classification of diseases, is…

Winning new business it not always the royal road to growth. In fact, sometimes it’s the last thing a company needs right now. Particularly if the team already has too much on their plates. Trying to accommodate new clients that they can’t even service isn’t good for anybody. The trouble is, we’re all human and sometimes we get greedy. Prospective clients flatter us by saying that they’ve heard great…

In an organization, being a leader involves more than simply finding solutions for problems within your direct responsibilities. It also involves addressing the problems that might impact everything that relates to your overall work experience. That’s the impact of systems thinking. By seeing and respecting the contextual structures that underlie complex situations, you can share observations and suggest ideas for creating improvement across the entire organization. Even if they…

Dilbert’s human resources manager once told him that it was a burden to remember his name, so from now on, he would refer to him as either buddy or big guy. The employee responded, how about I just get a nametag? Then you could just read it. To which his manager replied, do I look like I have that kind of time? Interestingly enough, sixteen years later, that iconic…

Systems thinkers look at the whole, not just the parts. They judge the worth of a system based on its end to end effectiveness, rather than on how efficiently individual parts operate. Ackoff, the organizational theorist, consultant and professor, was one of the pioneers it the field of systems thinking. One of his notable rants was about the fallacy of efficiency. He said the righter we do the wrong…

Nametags are my favorite accessory, but also my favorite analogy. If there is a particular idea, story or experience that needs to be conveyed in an interesting and persuasive way, my default linguistic tool is to refer to it as a nametag. If an idea is sticky and playful and human and disarming, that’s a nametag. If there is a person who makes a small, simple effort to connect…

Phenomenology is the study of consciousness. How things appear in our own subjective, direct experience. Husserl, the founding father of this discipline, said that the number one job of the phenomenologist is to describe. To denote any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to our experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality. What’s beautiful about this philosophy is, it’s wildly…

Motivation doesn’t happen to us, it happens in us. Which means the question we should ask ourselves is, what is the cost of inaction? After all, if the pain of staying the same doesn’t outweigh the pain of change, then we will never create a strong enough reason to motivate ourselves. It’s the simple calculus of human motivation. People rarely do anything about their pain until it gets to…