Work-Life-Meaning

Generativity, in General

March 28, 2014

Tweet The word ‘generative’ may be unfamiliar to many business people, but the quality of generativity is something we’ve sought in our companies and our work practices for a long time.   Something is generative when it’s able to create something new, something original, or something alive. A generative idea produces new ideas, a generative process […]

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My TEDxHoboken Talk: The Boost Revolution

October 22, 2013

Tweet It is a truth universally acknowledged: … that watching yourself on a grainy video talking about the ideas closest to your heart is rather mortifying.  So, with a little cringing, I’m excited to be able to share the video of my TEDxHoboken talk, The Boost Revolution: Expanding Possibilities for Business. It took some time […]

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Don’t Tell Esty That Authenticity Is Getting “Old” — The Social Dynamic Between Crafters and Buyers is Timeless

October 27, 2011

Tweet “A deluge of vintage and artisanal products is now available online and through mass-market retailers. Has authenticity become just another fad?”   Here’s a quick response to today’s New York Times article by Emily Weinstein, All That Authenticity May Be Getting Old, about the flood of ‘authentic’, handmade and one-of-a-kind-ish items on the home […]

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Is Gamification a Cure for Entitlement?

October 19, 2011

Tweet What value is all this talk about gamification? It’s one thing to deploy game-design tactics to turn your for-profit services (like Foursquare or Hashable) into games. By playing games, folks actually will train themselves to use these products. More troubling to me is the idea of using gamification to redesign work tasks. Gamification and […]

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The “New” Crisis of Meaning?

October 4, 2011

Tweet What’s up with the word “new” in the phrase “meaning is the new motivator”? From all corners of the interwebz conversation about ‘business’, I see mention of this idea that meaning at work is something new, something that we have just begun to desire. Seriously. It seems to come as a surprise, or as […]

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5 Ways That Systems of Engagement Bring Out Our Full Social Selves

June 22, 2011

Tweet Technology has a way of sucking the humanity right out of us. Consider how we describe, design and deploy ‘enterprise 2.0’ and work system technologies in our organizations: — When we talk about technology systems, we talk about machines, platforms, inputs and outputs.  We forget about values, emotion, flourishing, meaning and purpose. — When […]

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Make Distinctiveness Matter by Linking It To Organizational Purpose

June 14, 2011

Tweet Does it really matter if an organization is “distinctive”? When an organization’s distinctiveness (identity) is linked with the organization’s purpose (greater social goal), the organization’s unique qualities provide the unique resources needed to achieve that purpose. Organizational Distinctiveness is more than Positioning Managers often dismiss the concept of organizational “distinctiveness”, thinking that distinctiveness is […]

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Your Authentic Social Network: The Identity Graph

January 24, 2011

Tweet You’ve heard about the Social Graph and the Interest Graph. Now meet the Identity Graph— the online network of the authentic, social, interpersonal you. Different kinds of relationships create different graphs. Each of us has our own social network that’s comprised of a hodgepodge of different kinds of connections. We have social connections between […]

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Rethinking a Work Life Fit Issue: Am I late again, or on some other schedule?

January 4, 2011

Tweet As I was gearing up this morning to look over the past year’s blog posts, I found myself being pulled down by that feeling that I was “late again”. It seems as though I missed another key seasonal window … while other bloggers spent the time between Cristmas and New Year’s crafting recaps of […]

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3 Dangerous Assumptions in Corporate Work-Life Policy

October 12, 2010

Tweet Isn’t Corporate Work-Life policy great? Here we have a progressive set of programs and strategies that: Acknowledge that every employee is more than a worker, Recognize that she or he is also a ‘whole person’ with a life that extends outside the workplace, and Demonstrate that employees’ full lives should be respected and maybe […]

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