August 14, 2023
Good morning! There comes a magical time during the peak of harvest season when the food of French peasants is elevated to de rigueur for elite gourmands Ratatatouille forever! Make some today… it will soon be too late for another whole year — and then you will have regrets.
- What are you reading?
- Thank goodness for friends and colleagues who are more up on literature than I! Demon Copperhead, Kingsolver, 2022.
- During a recent trip to Rochester, MN (Wow, has that city grown and changed!) I witnessed a phenomenon I hadn’t noticed before: People reading in bars.
- Lots of different people reading, not just an anomaly.
- In a short period of time, at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon, at least a dozen or more young men and women were observed seated with drinks in front of them, reading.
- Seemingly oblivious, even to their beverage.
- Reading alone… I had heard of Bowling Alone (Putnam), but never reading alone in a saloon during Happy Hour.
- Simone Biles is back!
- Which begs the question: When is being the absolute best still not good enough?
- Seen somewhere: “We no longer go on-line… we live on-line.” (So true!) Even when/ if we don’t want to.
- And they said it wasn’t possible…
- “The job market is still on a slow but steady path towards a soft landing.” (Zhao)
- 187,000 jobs were added last month — more than half of them in health care and social services; counterintuitively, state government jobs decreased by 10,000 nationwide.
- Boston Consulting Group represents it has done the most exhaustive research on the planet in search of the most innovative organizations.
- This longitudinal study reveals the Top 50 companies — and here we list just the Top Ten as reported by them.
- Studies like this have been done for decades (centuries?) in an effort to identify secret sauces that can be replicated elsewhere.
- Remember In Search of Excellence? Required reading, re-reading, quoting from, and memorization back in 1982. (Peters, Waterman)
- Study these supposedly ‘most innovative organizations’ now — and then, more importantly, stir up your own secret sauce from what you learn:
- Apple
- Tesla
- Amazon
- Alphabet
- Microsoft
- Moderna
- Samsung
- Huawei
- Byd Company
- Siemens
- What can change in just one year? Missing from the list are Sony and IBM from 2022.
- An Australian start-up has developed a disposable bag that aims to be more sustainable than plastic ones…
- “All the plastic that’s ever been created still exists in some form.” (BBC, 2023)
- Negativity in the work place plagues and hurts all of us from time to time.
- Here are a few principles for leaders to remember:
- Negativity is common because people are seduced into a belief pattern that fears fatalistic outcomes and prepare for the worst;
- Most people who would be classified as negative don’t want to be… they take previous experiences and project them forward…
- Positivity is better than negativity, but no one is positive — or negative — 100% of the time.
- Leaders refuse to let a bout of temporary negativity permanently change them.
- Negativity on a team is like a weed, it spreads quickly and can be difficult to root-out.
- Untreated, negativity will rule the day… gotta fix it. (Informed by Eades)
- Biggest mistakes leaders make?
- Being too empathetic vs. Being insensitive — both at the same time…
- Which leads to the question: To what extent is culture more powerful than any leader?
- Which resurfaces one of our favourite reminders of all time:
- “At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 people to guard the past.” (Maeterlinck)
- “With gratitude, optimism is sustainable.” (Fox)
- From the United States Department of Labour:
- Forty percent (40%) of us are working from home some of the time — and half of those all of the time (that’s 20% of the total, right?!).
- And, there are sixty-six percent (66%) of us working from somewhere at any point in time if we are eligible to be working… (not sure what that means?!?)
- Is that in a 24 hour cycle or an 8 hour cycle; weekends? IDK
- There is an eleven percent (11%) gap between employees and employers regarding the perception of productivity when not at the office.
- (Guess who thinks it’s less productivity and who thinks it’s more productivity?)
- These data frustrate us at times because they tend to focus on those who, using the old term, are white collar workers and have an office — or used to have one.
- We will get to Labour Day soon enough to salute those who have no offices and surely never did, nor will they ever, probably.
- And, more than 66% of them are no doubt working at any point in time or the world would soon stop.
A Nickel for your Thoughts
By Michael A. Mullin
Is finding a battered nickel on the street
equivalent to discovering five lucky pennies?
Or is it worthless because it’s not
even made of nickel?
Of course neither is a penny coined from copper anymore.
Is it the copper that’s lucky or the penny itself?
Once I found thirty pennies in a parking lot,
scattered like seeds among the gravel, stones and debris.
Someone had flung them as if they were worthless.
No one else had thought to pick them up.
I picked up every single one, but I might have missed one.
If I did miss one, what if it was the lucky one?
©2017 Michael A. Mullin
