People fall in love with what they work on, or so research by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and the ubiquitous Dan Ariely reports. They discovered that when people have to work to create something — like an IKEA bookshelf — they see it through rose-colored glasses. It’s not that you do what you love but that labor leads to loving what you do. It becomes part of your self-esteem.
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Tell me your favorite posts and you could win an hour of consulting worth $200!
UPDATE: Contest extended until Tuesday, 2013 March 26, at 11:59 PM Chicago local time. ALSO! Votes by email and Facebook now allowed by popular demand!
To all my readers:
I’ve been asked to provide a professional society with three or four great blog posts for them to repost. It gives them some nonstandard content and gives me some exposure so it’s win-win!
The problem: I’m not…
Get Your Staging Right to Get Your Expertise Heeded
Presentation matters. A lot. Whether you are trying to get a job, sell a point, or get some respect in your house of worship, you need to spend some time on how the “you” you present to other people makes it easier or harder for them to believe in you.
We co-create social realities. The “presentation of self”, as Erving Goffman put it, involves creating meaning often via props and stag…
Jazz Combo is Stupid Metaphor for Organizations
A long time ago, I wrote the following commenting on something Luc Hoebeke told me at his house outside Leuven. It’s a good reminder today as I continue to see people want large endeavors to work like tight jazz combos. I have some friends and relatives who are pros – instrumentalists and vocalists in pop, jazz and even baroque chamber — and have been gotten an earful about what leading…
Strategy vs. Execution: What is strategy anyway?
Let’s continue our look at strategy vs. execution with a further look at what strategy is.
Most business people seem to use “strategy” to mean “reasons that we do something” or “basis for our decision-making”. Execution builds the car while strategy says what car to build, or whether you should build a car at all at this time. You can execute flawlessly by building the car perfectly but…
Postmodernism is an art of the surface; but so were the Gothics
Postmodern art, like Neoclassical art, is above all an art of the surface: an art of reflections rather than visions. It has thrived in the depthless world of high-speed offset printing and digital design, where modernism starves. But the world of the sribes, in which the craft of type design is rooted, was a depthless world too. It was the world of the Gothic painters, in which everything is…
New Look, New Stuff Coming
If you’re getting my RSS feeds, you probably haven’t seen much. I munged it during the changeover to a new setup, for which I apologize.
I’m putting in a new look to help with the new course that will replace The Secret Rules of Career Success. It will be a several week online video course for 2HiPo’s where I will give you all the important points about how work works that I have learned over…
Dragon’s Den, here she comes! Huzzah for Mary & Luigi!
A big congratulations to commenter (and all around cool person) Mary McQueen for making the cut onto Dragon’s Den. DD is kind of the Canadian version of Shark Tank for the Americans. If you’re not in North America, I really don’t know what it compares to. Hopefully I will be able to point Witopia to a Canadian VPN access point and watch the show when it comes out.
A hearty congratulations to…
Summer Reading List
Like everyone else, I do a good deal of summer reading on the way to here or there. Or simply waiting for my baby to stop screaming. (Poor GERDy kid!) In addition to the mindless Kindle reading, which I’ll have to list elsewhere simply because I have no idea how to pull off my list from it, I’ve been busy with a bunch of research for a book I’m working on for someone else and some stuff that I’m…
GenX Future, According to Rod Serling
Back in season one of his show, The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling penned a prophecy of GenX’s end. By taking a look at it, you GenXers can see what lies in store for you at the end of your life.
The episode is “One For the Angels” starring the incomparable Ed Wynn as Lew Bookman, a barely making it, apparently single, aged, Lost Generation sidewalk peddler who gets a visit from Death.
I’ll b…