Red meat is weird, wacky, gruesome and black. Here are a few of my favourites: Ball bearings in the butter tub, the white-hot cure for sticky valves, drool string ukulele, apocalypso facto or the ebullient egg-sac of ennui.
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Profit for nonprofits
I read about Pioneer Human Services in a book, and it blew me away. They operate a succesful company that employs among others ex-convicts and drug addicts – the people who most need jobs, but usually can’t get them. They also provide housing, training, counselling and other services. And most of this is paid for through the revenue that the company generates, instead of by public or private grants. There’s an excellent article in Fast Company about them.
And because they make their own money, they don’t need to spend much time or energy asking for grants – they can spend their time actually helping people who need it. I have the deepest respect for people who have the creativity to come up with such a vision and the determination to make it happen. Knowing that initiatives like this can succeed makes me feel good abour our common future.
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Book review: The power of spirit
Harrison Owen is the inventor of Open Space Technology, the most exciting and productive way of meeting with other people that I know of. In The power of spirit, how organizations transfrom he describes what an organization might look like, if it lived by the open space principles. And let me say this right away: If they’re hiring, I want to work there!
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Pumpkinspiration
Enterprise Systems had their 2nd. annual halloween pumpkin carving party yesterday. Kids and adults both had a great time, and you can see the results here. I did this one and I’m kinda proud of it, it’s only my third pumpkin ever.
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Exercise: Journal of good things
I have a confession: A friend told me about this exercise, and I’m afraid that she heard about it on Oprah… But hey, It’s still good.
Anyway, it’s about creating a daily positive space for reflection. Try it!
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Book review: The soul at work
Complexity science is appearing more and more often in business literature (and just about everywhere else). This book with the subtitle “unleashing the power of complexity science for business success” shows a better way to manage organizations than the old command-and-control way, and describes some of the tools needed to get there. It helped put me on to the “joy at work” project.
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TietoEnator buys Enterprise Systems
It’s official, Enterprise Systems has been sold to TietoEnator.
It’s a little ironic that this deal is finalized almost exactly 5 years after we started the company. It’s also a little sad, but I truly believe that this is the best option for Enterprise to develop. TE can give the company resources and strategic direction that we could never have found on our own.
I can look back on a great time, building a great company. We (meaning not only the founders but every single ES employee) created a company where people had fun, were committed, learned and developed as people – all the while making lots of money.
I already left the company a few months back, so I will not be a part of ES’ future in TE. I wish the guys (and the one gal) the best of luck, I know they’ll all do great. They’re the smartest, nicest, cleverest, most sympathetic people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, and I’m sure that exciting stuff is waiting for them!
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Word of the day: Affluenza
Af-flu-en-za n. 1. The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses. 2. An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the American Dream. 3. An unsustainable addiction to economic growth. 4. A television program that could change your life.
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Exercise: Faster or slower
Is faster always better? Try this exercise, and see what you think.
Let’s say that you want to optimize some process to save time.
In many activities, you can take all the fun out of it if you hurry too much. For example, I used to be a hell-bent skier. This happens when you’re living in flat, snow-less Demark, and you only have the chance to ski for one week every year. By god, I wanted the most skiing I could possibly get! So I got up really early every morning, I took almost no breaks (except for a short lunch break), and I generally drove myself and everybody around me to exhaustion and desperation. Then on a trip a couple of years ago, I learned that by relaxing a little, taking a lot of breaks, I’d get less skiing done, but I’d enjoy it a hell of a lot more. Say 20% less skiing, 80% more fun! And I’ve found that this equation holds in many other activities.
So, what is it that happens when you try do something faster? Odds are, that beyond a certain point, the faster you do it, the less you enjoy it. Maybe it’s just more fun when you do it slowly. Alternatively, you may become stressed because you’re not doing it as fast as you’d like.
So this is the exercise: Find a process or action you’d like to optimize (it can be anything really, your morning drive to work, your evening meal or something you do at work), and then try to do it faster or slower. Keep a journal where you log the time it took and how you liked the experience. Then try to see if there’s a connection, and try to see if there’s an optimal “hurry level”, that doesn’t eliminate the fun.
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Book review: Faster
Time is the one totally democratic resource. No matter who you are, a day still only has 24 hours.
But these days, everything seems to go faster. We try to cram more and more into every day, and we’ve come to hate and fear periods of inaction, especially those we don’t choose for ourselves.
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