Living la Covida Loca in the office

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Now that office and home blurred into this wonderous mix of continuous office work and housework, one might wonder about what the future might hold. Here is a helpful list

1. We have learned how to zoom and Microsoft teams. All those meetings that could have been an email have been revealed for what they truly are. Little black holes where not even the truest wisdom could possibly escape. You will be emboldened with this newfound knowledge.
2. Housing prices went through roof. The fear of missing out drove so many into purchasing something they may not live long enough to pay off the mortgage and regret. As Thoreau said, it wasn’t so much that they got the house as the house got them. You will have to downsize your home office to make room for your adult children boomeranging back.
3. All the introverts became ecstatic at being forced to binge watch to their hearts content. They are now dreading having to work socialize once again. I’m just saying this because a friend told me. But with all those shows, now you have something to talk about.
4. A lot of people went out and got COVID-19 support pets. We already had two golden retrievers before all this happened. I did splurge and got one more koi for the pond out back. The little guy has taken refuge in the pond filter for the last couple of months. Like everyone in their home. He will not be happy come fall when everyone comes back in the aquarium to overwinter. Look into automatic feeders. For the pets, not your children.
5. Time will tell if we see a lot of COVID-19 children. If anything, there might be a pullback since few people are entering into new relationships. There may be less tension in the air since people have a reason not to keep entering the dating scene. Few people really regret binge watching. It’s more of a humble brag when they do mention it.
6. Putting in an automatic reply that you are on vacation will change. For the office, go to voice mail and email. For the rest of family, you will have to rely upon sticky notes on your door and auto reply on text, in case that is the only way your children now interact with you.
7. For the office, divert incoming work to a trained associate. For the home, divert laundry to a trained child and just be prepared to live with the results.
8. For the smaller office, just ensure automatic payments are going for various repetitive expenses. For the home, arrange for a once-a-week delivery of frozen easily microwavable foodstuffs. And a bottle of chewable vitamins since healthy and microwaveable are rarely in the same sentence on the wrapping.
9. Now that the pandemic existential crisis is coming to an end, and the climate existential crisis never left and is picking up speed, the next crisis will be what to wear to work. Now that employers might have this expectation you have to return to a place of employment
10. If you picked up the COVID 20 pounds, then maybe the only things that still fit are shoes and hats. Everything in between became a distant memory.  You will have to remember the fun you used to have going to the mall to shop aimlessly. You have been given a renewed purpose!

Keep living the Covida Loca!

Leading your life-Chapter 2

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Can a business model help your own life?

The question then becomes what is the connection between how a corporation runs and how an individual can run their own life. Corporations have always used objectives such as profits, return on investment and dividends paid amongst other criteria.  Can this somehow predicate the happiness of the Corporation or do we have a similar kind of dichotomy between man and business?

Does the satisfaction of these corporate criteria also refer only to contentment?  The satisfaction of these various corporate objectives does lead to the payment of dividends, wages and bonuses, which can lead to the contentment of individuals.  If indeed the Corporation’s soul is made up of the individuals that run the organization, then we could have an argument that a similar dichotomy exists between contentment and true happiness within a corporation.  This would suggest that a corporation having the values of the individual would also seek to maximize its happiness by leading a highly moral life.

If a corporation could somehow be happy in the satisfaction of its mission and vision statement, then it stands to reason that a similar achievement of a personal mission and vision statement would lead to the happiness of an individual. However, there’s a further questions of whether or not happiness of the individual is somehow separate apart from the individuation or actualization of the individual. 

It would seem that an individual would want to become fully actualized through the accumulation of skills and wisdom and perhaps wealth.  If it individual wishes to become actualized through work, this is somehow consistent with leading a highly moral life.  One should be able to lead a highly moral life and still become actualized.  Actualization may have to do more with the contentment of the individual and the resolution of various desires of that particular individual

Leading your life.

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Examine an analogy between the standard corporation and the nature of men and women. The soulless corporation depends upon the values of those that run the organization to determine its own values. One would think that the values of individuals align with the Corporation’s. Perhaps the true happiness of an individual may be analogous to the happiness of the organization.

The happiness of an individual can be divided into two main criteria. The first requires finding happiness in the satisfaction of the various desires that individuals have. An individual could be happy either based on the satisfaction of these desires or the elimination of these desires. However happiness could be far more complicated. The resolution of various desires would be more clearly defined as contentment. Happiness of the individual would then be dependent upon the moral values of that individual and leading a highly moral life. This may be a bit too simplistic since leading a highly moral life is insufficient. Having good fortune is also relatively important. Sickness and poverty are severe overlying factors that can prevent or mitigate against leading a moral life and true happiness.

So we need to lay out some specific goals to keep centered.

#leadership#motivation#business

Can you lead your life like you lead your business?

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Trying to figure out life’s purpose in the midst of a pandemic can be disheartening.
One wonders if a business approach might help show you how to systematically find this out on your own.

Why a Business Model?

One might think that using a business model to one’s own life simply allows the problem to take control over a larger portion of your existence. But what if there were a way to try and apply what you have already learned to living a better life? Most people are involved in business in some fashion or another in order to earn income. Would applying those business skills somehow be of help to strategically lay out your own life to achieve your own personal vision and mission statement? Doing what you know and do best applies to most things. Certainly this would also apply to life, and using those honed business skills would make your life one of the top organizations for years to come.

I am going to focus on this for a while and let you know what we can find.

#business#leadership#leadership#inspiration

Phoenix Failure

The mythological phoenix rose from the ashes every 500 years. Did that mean it failed?

I don’t know about you, but I hate failing at anything. Learning to love failing simply does not appear to be a successful strategy.

Barings Bank failed 25 years ago when rogue trader Nick Leeson conducted a series of unauthorized arbitrage trades and caused a loss of $1.3 billion. So the bank would have learned to supervise his activities a bit closer if they weren’t so happy with the money he initially brought in. So failure seems to suggests being unwilling or unable to try again.

If your strategy appears to have failed, and you try a new strategy to achieve a goal, then you haven’t failed at achieving your goal. You simply learned that your initial approach to achieve your goal would not work, so you tried something different.

Leeson was sentenced to 6 years and got divorced. That sounds like failure, but he must have learned something since he got remarried, wrote two books one of which was made into movie starring Ewan McGregor.

They say fail often, and quickly. But if you pick yourself up and try again, then you haven’t really failed since you haven’t stopped trying.

 

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Retirement Untethered: National Burnout Vacation; Can Retirement be Better?

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Clark Griswold:
Despite all the little problems it’s fun isn’t it?

Ellen:
No. But with every new day there’s fresh hope.

National Lampoon’s Vacation

 

Like many people, you may have gone on vacation, or perhaps you plan to go on vacation.  So, what constitutes a vacation? And would retirement be one extended vacation? Webster’s defines vacation as a period spent away from home or business in travel or recreation, a scheduled period during which activity (as of a court or school) is suspended, a period of exemption from work granted to an employee, a respite or a time of respite from something.

So, did this actually happen? Did you totally go off the grid for that period of time when you had a choice? Probability suggests you checked your email, perhaps late at night or first thing in the morning before the family woke. A little quality time with your iPad perhaps.

 

Why do people go on vacation? Chance of pace? To get away from it all? Family pressure? To de-stress? Perhaps test what retirement might feel like?

 

Perhaps you hope that this de-stress hormone lasts for at least as long as the vacation itself. Or that you can you store the de-stress hormone up as easily as the extra weight you may have put on from the extra consumption of alcohol, fats, carbohydrates that you would have otherwise avoided.

 

In a 2018 American Psychological Association survey of more than 1500 US workers, two-thirds of the respondents said that the mental benefits of vacation disappeared within a few days. So the vacation calmness disappears far before the weight loss does.

 

The reasons for increased après-vacation stress can be obvious. The workload undoubtedly accumulated in your absence, things moved on during your gallivanting. Now you must move double time to catch up and all of that stress filled time you spent before the vacation appears not to have been enough to keep you ahead.

 

If you feel stressed before the vacation, and even more stressed after the vacation, then one starts to wonder about the efficacy of going on vacation in the first place.

 

This becomes a good time to talk about burnout. In the 2015 edition of Acta Psychopathologica, work-related stress occurs when the demands of the work environment exceed the employees’ ability to cope. The Diagnostic Statistical Manual 5 states that disorders precipitated by specific stressful and potentially traumatic events in the workplaces are included in a new diagnostic category, “Trauma and Stress-related Disorders”. Mind you, this abstract was dealing with the police in Italy.

 

If you sprain your ankle playing tennis for the first time since forever during your vacation, you likely know RICE, rest ice, compression and elevation. The same RICE can identify burnout with Regret, Inefficacy, Cynicism and Exhaustion.
Over 40% of California lawyers would do something different if they had to do it over again. This constitutes a high level of regret. Lack of actualization can lead to a feeling of inefficacy, and difficult as it may seem, burnout indicates even higher levels of cynicism that what you normally have. Exhaustion likely originated during articling and never dissipated.

A number of firms insist upon employees taking vacation. The firm’s rationale could range from an actual concern for employee health or for the ever expanding health benefit costs. If an employee leaves as a result of stress, there comes the extensive cost of locating, rehiring and training new staff. Far better to maintain the mental health of the existing staff.

In addition to vacations, employers should be considering breaks during the work cycle. Standing up and getting that wilted salad to eat in front of the computer does not cut it. An employee requires greater dedicated time to mental breaks along with physical activity on a regular basis. The same APA study found that staff became far more productive and content with their position when employers cared about employee’s mental health.

 

 

#retirement

 

Sell me this pen!

I thought this an amazing example of establishing need for a product. Spoiler alert. In the Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio asks someone to sell him a pen. The person answering takes the pen and asks DiCaprio to write down his name. This created a need, albeit somewhat artificial.

During an interview, you might be asked a similar type of question. Some people simply discuss the value attributes of the pen. Shiny, easy to hold. Others ask questions as to what the interviewer might look for in a pen. What did they like about the last pen they had? Others identify a problem, as above, and show how the pen solves the problem. The solution based approach.

There appears to be one more step beyond that. In Shiller’s book, Narrative Economics, he discusses how the first solution based approach is analytic self-referencing. Why you need the pen to write your name. He suggests a narrative self-referencing and narrative transportation approach. This suggests telling the interviewer to imagine themselves taking this pen and signing a multi-billion dollar contract.

Perhaps a bit delusional, but impactful all the same.

A suggestion to raise yourself above the pack.

#management #personaldevelopment #business #leader #innovation #marketing

Guiding Principles

Does a company need guiding principles? I volunteered to have a look at some of ours to see if I could condense them somewhat. Which of course led to the first question; What do they accomplish?

Principles reflect your vision, mission, strategic interests, and core values and constitute a broad philosophy that guides an organization. They become part of the brand, which includes everything you say or do.

So guiding principles should then imbue everything you say or do. This includes the type of deals you construct, the people you hire, the person you want to become.

#management #leadership #business #motivation #culture #competencies  #personaldevelopment

Keeping the faith

What you are searching for may be just beyond the next wave.

Notwithstanding the huge crowds in front of the Mona Lisa, no one stood in front of the The Raft of the Medusa which portrays the moment when, after 13 days adrift on the raft, the remaining 15 survivors view a ship approaching from a distance. The painting is on a monumental scale of 193 × 282 in, so that most of the figures rendered are life-sized and those in the foreground almost twice life-size.

Detail from the lower left corner of the canvas showing two dying figures. The men in the middle have just viewed a rescue ship; one points it out to another.

I found this fascinating showing the range of emotions on such a small raft.

#business #personalbranding #motivation #personaldevelopment  #mindfulness