Work-Life-Meaning

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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The Stress of Not Having It All, guest post by Fran Melmed

December 2, 2010

Tweet [One of the special joys of blogging and tweeting about progressive movements in organizations and leadership is the relationships we make as we find kindred souls. These kindred souls are often tucked into niches other than our own, but because their approaches share the our fundamental values and because they are working with a [...]

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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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Is your organization flourishing or withering?

September 22, 2010

Tweet Organizations are organic things — they are born, they die, they suffer and they thrive. But very few organizations flourish. Organizations that flourish are rare creatures. We find them where business goals are tied to larger purpose, where larger purpose is linked to community needs, and where individuals’ authentic selves are nourished by and [...]

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