Compassion

“It’s nothing personal, it’s just business.”

We spend more than 50% of our lives at work. Why would anyone want to wake up in the morning and go to work with that attitude? If you don’t make it personal, and if you don’t make it count, what’s the
point?

Business is missing one important core value: compassion.

“Between work and family, I have no time for community.”

This is something everyone feels at some point in their lives. But think about it: What if we made community an integral part of our business? What if we recognized that we can’t have strong businesses without a strong community and we can’t have a strong community
without compassion?

The real way strong communities are built is through the compassion we extend to others. Both to those we know, and to those we don’t know.

The Internet is amazing because it connects us all. Compassion for those around us now extends globally and beyond our physical boundaries.

We can all do more for each other and be better.

Be compassionate to everyone no matter the level of connection.

Make compassion a core business value.

Start with a smile to a stranger.

Start by getting others to nod in agreement when you say: “If we’re not compassionate to one another, what’s the point in the end?”

~Mitch Joel

Evangelism

The future belongs to people who can spread ideas. Here are ten things to remember:

1. Create a cause. A cause seizes the moral high ground and makes people’s lives better.

2. Love the cause. “Evangelist” isn’t a job title. It’s a way of life. If you don’t love a cause, you can’t evangelize it.

3. Look for agnostics, ignore atheists. It’s too hard to convert people who deny your cause. Look for people who are supportive or neutral instead.

4. Localize the pain. Never describe your cause by using bull shiitake terms like “revolutionary” and “paradigm shifting.” Instead, explain how it helps a person.

5. Let people test drive the cause. Let people try your cause, take it home, download it, and then decide if it’s right for them.

6. Learn to give a demo. A person simply cannot evangelize a product if she cannot demo it.

7. Provide a safe first step. Don’t put up any big hurdles in the beginning of the process. e path to adopting a cause needs a slippery slope.

8. Ignore pedigrees. Don’t focus on the people with big titles and big reputations. Help anyone who can help you.

9. Never tell a lie. Credibility is everything for an evangelist. Tell the truth—even if it hurts. Actually, especially if it hurts.

10. Remember your friends. Be nice to the people on the way up because you might see them again on the way down.

~Guy Kawasaki

Harmony

The word harmony carries some serious baggage. Soft, namby-pamby, liberal, weak. Men who value harmony aren’t considered macho. Women who value harmony are considered stereotypical.
Success is typically defined with words like hard (sell, line, ass). Successful people are lauded for being argumentative, self-interested, disruptive. But those assumptions are the dregs of a culture that celebrates the lone hero who leads with singular ambition all the while damning the sheep who follow him in harmonious ignorance.

No.

Harmony is a springboard. Harmony supports teamwork. And teamwork creates energy. An energy that fuels creativity.

When focusing on harmony, success becomes defined by different terms. Contribution. Dedication. Cooperation.

Harmony takes bravery, an open heart. It takes lying awake at night when one of your co-workers is having a rough patch and dreaming up ways to help.

In the true sense of karma, to achieve harmony, you must always do the right thing with no eye on a reward. The reward will come because there is trust on the other side. Harmony creates a workplace where you and all the people around you love to be.

~Jack Covert

Power

Power provokes ambivalence. Power-seeking is politically incorrect. So power remains cloaked in mystery and emotion, the organization’s last dirty secret.

John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, noted that nothing gets done without power. Social change requires the power to mobilize
resources. That’s why leaders are preoccupied with power. As Michael  Marmot and other epidemiological researchers show, possessing the power to control your work and social environment—having autonomy and control over your job—is one of the best predictors of health and mortality.

Obtaining power requires will and skill—the ambition to do the hard work necessary, and the insight required to direct your energy productively. Power comes from an ability to build your reputation, create efficient and effective networks of social relations, act and  speak in ways that build influence, and from an ability to create and employ resources—things that others want and need.

Stop waiting around for bosses and companies to get better and complaining about how are you treated. Build the skills—and use them—that will permit you to create the environment in which you
want to live.

~ Jeffrey Pfeffer

Consequence

There is little evidence that we will solve the environmental challenges of our time. Individuals too readily allow responsibility for the solutions to fall on larger entities like governments, rather than themselves. I find one very significant reason for hope amidst this largely hopeless topic. We are learning to measure consequence. Galileo said something akin to “measure what is measurable,
make measurable what is not.” We are slowly gaining expertise in measuring our impact in terms of carbon, energy demand, water use, and toxicity production.

Why is this hopeful? Now that we can say definitively that even the production of a soda bottle has a measurable (if tiny) increase in greenhouse gases, it’s hard for a thinking individual not to acknowledge that they are working against the things they say they want. After a century of isolating the product or service from its resulting impact, the tide is turning. We are making consequence visible. We will witness the first generation who can truly know the impact of everything they do on the ecological support systems that surround them.

My hope is that we will use this knowledge wisely. We will put aside old ideas of what is good and bad for the environment and ourselves, and will quantitatively make the changes we need with new foresight.

~Saul Griffith

Momentum

Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an “Outlier.” He is, of course, right. My mother says practice makes
perfect. She is, of course, right. A billionaire friend once told me to read one of the best stories on successful living, The Tortoise and
the Hare. He says, “Every time I read that book, the tortoise wins. Slow and steady wins the race.” He is, of course, right.

Whether it is branding or wealth building, I call it the Momentum Theorem.

FOCUSED INTENSITY over TIME multiplied by GOD equals Unstoppable Momentum.

Not many people in our A.D.D. culture can stay FOCUSED, but those who can are on their way to winning. Add to the focus some serious pull-your-shirt-off-and paint yourself-blue-at-the-football-game INTENSITY, and now you have a person who is a difference-maker. But very few companies or people can maintain that FOCUSED INTENSITY over TIME. It takes time to be great, it takes time to create critical mass, it takes time to be an “overnight success.” Lastly, you and I are finite, while GOD is infinite. So, multiply your efforts through Him and watch the areas of your life move toward winning like never before.

~Dave Ramsey

Poker

BUSINESS IS A GAME

Everything I know about business I learned from poker: financials, strategy, education, and culture.

FINANCIALS
• The guy who wins the most hands is not the guy who makes the most money in the long run.
• The guy who never loses a hand is not the guy who makes the most money in the long run.
• Go for positive expected value, not what’s least risky.
• You will win or lose individual hands, but it’s what happens in the long term that matters.

STRATEGY
• Learn to adapt. Adjust your style of play as the dynamics of the  game change.
• The players with the most stamina and focus usually win.
• Hope is not a good plan.
• Stick to your principles.

EDUCATION
• Never stop learning. Read books. Learn from others who have done it before.
• Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience.
• Just because you win a hand doesn’t mean you’re good and you don’t have more learning to do. You might have just gotten lucky.

CULTURE
• To become really good, you need to live it, breathe it, and sleep it.
• Be nice and make friends. It’s a small community.
• Have fun. The game is a lot more enjoyable when you’re trying to do more than just make money.

~ Tony Hsieh

Autonomy

Management isn’t natural.

I don’t mean that it’s weird or toxic – just that it doesn’t emanate from nature. “Management” isn’t a tree or a river. It’s a telegraph or a transistor radio. Somebody invented it. And over time, most inventions – from the candle to the cotton gin to the compact disc – lose their usefulness.

Management is great if you want people to comply – to do specific things a certain way. But it stinks if you want people to engage – to think big or give the world something it didn’t know it was missing.
For creative, complex, conceptual challenges – i.e, what most of us now do for a living—40 years of research in behavioral science and human motivation says that self-direction works better. And that requires autonomy. Lots of it.

If we want engagement, and the mediocrity busting results it produces, we have to make sure people have autonomy over the four most important aspects of their work:

Task – What they do
Time – When they do it
Technique – How they do it
Team – Whom they do it with.

After a decade of truly spectacular underachievement, what we need now is less management and more freedom – fewer individual automatons and more autonomous individuals.

~Daniel H. Pink

Ripple

Education has a ripple effect. One drop can initiate a cascade of possibility, each concentric circle gaining in size and traveling further. If you get education right, you get many things right: escape from poverty, better family health, and improved status of women.

Educate a girl, and you educate her children and generations to follow.

Yet for hundreds of millions of kids in the developing world, the ripple never begins. Instead, there’s a seemingly inescapable whirlpool of poverty. In the words of a headmaster I once met in Nepal: “We are too poor to afford education. But until we have education, we will always be poor.”

That’s why there are 300 million children in the developing world who woke up this morning and did not go to school. And why there are over 750 million people unable to read and write, nearly 2/3 of whom are girls and women.

I dream of a world in which we’ve changed that. A world with thousands of new schools. Tens of thousands of new libraries. Each with equal access for all children.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.
The second best time is now.

~John Wood

Strengths

Forget about working on your weaknesses —> Focus on supporting your strengths.

I worked on my weaknesses for 40 years to little avail. Still “needs improvement,” as they say. Why? Easy. We hate doing things we’re not good at, so we avoid them. No practice makes perfect hard to attain.

But my strengths – ah, I love my strengths. I’ll work on them till the purple cows come home. When we love what we do, we do more and more, and pretty soon we’re pretty good at it.

The beautiful thing about being on a team is that, believe it or not, lots of people love doing the things you hate. And hate doing the things you love. So quit diligently developing your weaknesses. Instead, partner with someone very UNlike you, share the work and
share the wealth and everyone’s happy.

Relatedly, women are rather UNlike men and often approach problems and opportunities with a different outlook. Yet books and coaches often encourage us to adopt male strengths and, lacking understanding, to relinquish our own. The irony is, studies show that more women in leadership translates unequivocally into better business results.

Wouldn’t it make more sense for both men and women to appreciate each other’s strengths so we all work on what comes naturally?

~Marti Barletta

Most

Imagine any and every field possible. There are so many brands, so many choices, so many claims, so much clutter, that the central challenge is for an organization or an individual is to rise above the
fray. It’s not good enough anymore to be “pretty good” at everything. You have to be the most of something: the most elegant, the most colorful, the most responsive, the most accessible.

For decades, organizations and their leaders were comfortable with strategies and practices that kept them in the middle of the road—that’s where the customers were, so that’s what felt safe and secure.

Today, with so much change and uncertainty, so much pressure and new ways to do things, the middle of the road is the road to nowhere.

As Jim Hightower, the colorful Texas populist, is fond of saying, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”

We might add: companies and their leaders struggling to stand out from the crowd, as they play by the same old rules in a crowded
marketplace.

Are you the most of anything?

~William C. Taylor

Atom

The past decade has been an extraordinary adventure in discovering new social models on the Web—ways to work, create and organize outside of the traditional institutions of companies, governments and academia. But the next decade will be all about applying these models to the real world. Atoms are the new bits!

Just take one example: making stuff. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participants and participation in everything digital—the long tail of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing—the long tail of things. The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and little bit of self-taught expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production. They are a virtual microfactory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; everything is assembled and drop-shipped by the contractors, who can serve hundreds of such small customers simultaneously.

Today, there are microfactories making everything from cars to bike parts to local cabinetmakers with computer-controlled routers making bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is now about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into entrepreneurship, no
tooling required. “Three guys with laptops” used to describe a web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.

Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, DIY and UGC—all these digital phenomena are starting to play out in the world of atoms, too. e Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution gets real.

~Chris Anderson

Speaking

Speaking soon? Keep this in mind: people at events are hungry for authenticity. Saying something you might not have said elsewhere is a good way to find your authentic voice.

For my own conference, I oen give advice to speakers before they come on stage. Here’s an exercise for anyone who wants to connect with an audience.

A few weeks before the event, when you start preparing the talk, write out everything you spend your time doing - professional work, side projects at home, everything.

Now pick the one thing you’re most excited about.

Now consider: why is that so important to you?

Design your talk from that point, as if you started by saying, “My name is X, and I’m passionate about XYZ because...”

~Mark Hurst

One Percent

Two tech executives with no food experience and no marketing budget launch a product called Bacon Salt.

Next, they search for people on social networking sites who profess a love for bacon, then friend them. Among a small percentage of those people, enthusiasm begins to spread about Bacon Salt. What began as a tribe quickly multiplies into 37,000 fans on Facebook and MySpace.

Months later, the buzz spills over into newspaper articles, TV interviews and the holy grail of PR, an appearance on Oprah. Two guys who knew nothing about the food business and had no marketing budget now had a certifiable cult hit. Inspired, they create several other bacon-flavored products. It’s the birth of a brand.

Their success began with a small – very small – group of self-identified fans of a category. Even if social networks have millions of members, it will never translate into millions of buzz-spreaders. The Bacon Salt story illustrates that it’s usually a small percentage of the tribe within the larger tribe who spread the word—usually about 1 percent. They are the One Percenters.

The One Percenters are not the usual suspects of namebrand
tech bloggers, mommy bloggers and or business bloggers. The One Percenters are often hidden in the crevices of niches, yet they are the roots of word of mouth.

This year, your job is to find them and attract them.

~Jackie Huba

Enrichment

We are all on a search – a search for more meaning in our lives.

Through choosing to enrich other people’s lives, you add meaning to both their life and your own.

Some simple steps to follow:

1. Commit: Commit to lifetime-relationships that span events, companies, causes and geographic boundaries.

2. Care: Care for the concerns of others as if they are your own.

3. Connect: Aim to connect those who will benefit and enrich each other’s lives in equal measure.

4. Communicate: Communicate candidly. Tell people what they should hear rather than what they want to hear.

5. Expand Capacity: Aim to expand people’s capacity to help them give and get more from their own lives.

The Litmus Test: If you are truly enriching someone’s life, they will typically miss you in their past. They think their lives would have been even better if they had met you earlier.

You are only as rich as the enrichment you bring to the world around you.

~Rajesh Setty

Vision

Vision is the lifeblood of any organization. It is what keeps it moving forward. It provides meaning to the day-to-day challenges and setbacks that make up the rumble and tumble of real life.

In a down economy—particularly one that has taken most of us by surprise—things get very tactical. We are just trying to survive. What
worked yesterday does not necessarily work today. What works today may not necessarily work tomorrow. Decisions become pragmatic.

But after a while this wears on people. They don’t know why their efforts matter. They cannot connect their actions to a larger story. Their work becomes a matter of just going through the motions, living from weekend to weekend, paycheck to paycheck.

is is where great leadership makes all the difference. Leadership is more than influence. It is about reminding people of what it is we are trying to build—and why it matters. It is about painting a picture of a better future. It comes down to pointing the way and saying, “C’mon. We can do this!”

When times are tough, vision is the first casualty. Before conditions can improve, it is the first thing we must recover.

~Michael Hyatt

Ease

We are the strivingest people who have ever lived. We are ambitious, time-starved, competitive, distracted. We move at full velocity, yet constantly fear we are not doing enough. Though we live longer than any humans before us, our lives feel shorter, restless, breathless…

Dear ones, EASE UP. Pump the brakes. Take a step back. Seriously. Take two steps back. Turn off all your electronics and surrender over all your aspirations and do absolutely nothing for a spell. I know, I know – we all need to save the world. But trust me: The world will still need saving tomorrow. In the meantime, you’re going to have a stroke soon (or cause a stroke in somebody else) if you don’t calm the hell down.

So go take a walk. Or don’t. Consider actually exhaling. Find a body of water and float. Hit a tennis ball against a wall. Tell your colleagues that you’re off meditating (people take meditation seriously, so you’ll be absolved from guilt) and then actually, secretly, nap.

My radical suggestion? Cease participation, if only for one day this year – if only to make sure that we don’t lose forever the rare and vanishing human talent of appreciating  ease.

~Elizabeth Gilbert