$300,000,000,000
$300 billion. That is the cost to American employers for employee healthcare and employee absence related to workplace stress. It’s a big number. It also gives a dismaying sense of the physical, psychological and emotional trauma being experienced by millions of...
Robert Putnam and an Omaha Community of “We”
There is a troublingly massive and widening opportunity gap for kids today, asserts expert Robert Putnam. The most significant criterion that defines this gap is class, illustrated by conditions of increasing community segregation by wealth and by level of educational...
Moreover… (further reflections on authenticity and identity)
Personality requires an audience, states Richard Todd in his intriguing book, The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity. Todd goes on to note that the concept of character is different in that consistency is its hallmark, built out of incremental deeds, whereas...
Technology and Cupid
The caveat first, followed by the but… First, I believe, as many of us intuitively recognize, that technology in many ways has stunted our capacity to connect meaningfully with other people. Of course, it allows us to form a myriad of networks through which we...
Google’s Insight Into What Makes Teams Productive
Unproductive teams? Disengaged people? Insipid creativity in your culture? Charles Duhigg reveals the solutions to these problems in his New York Times article, “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team.” It turns out to be a simple solution. The...
A Look at the Land of Inclusion from the Island of Isolation
When inclusion is discussed in our workplaces it is often contextualized in categories, such as religious, ethnic, racial, gender or sexual orientation-based cohorts. That framing of inclusion then uses language that de-marginalizes perceived identities and amplifies...
Conversation and the Authenticity Dilemma
I recently wrote that authenticity is a concept of the self that is perpetually evolving and that conversation is a means by which we can navigate towards self-awareness. In reading Maria Konnikova’s book, The Confidence Game, I am reminded of another feature of the...
Improv as Conversation
I believe that through conversation we can live better and work well, as individuals and communities, personally and professionally. In that context, I spent the last two months experimenting with Improv, taking the beginner’s course with local Improv group, Backline...
Conversation and Inclusive Cultures
Joe Gerstandt is hopeful. An expert on inclusion, Joe had written a post expressing his excitement at signs that leaders, workplaces and communities were ready to put greater momentum behind issues of inclusion and diversity. Coinciding with Joe’s post was a segment...
Conversation as Therapy
In a social and business landscape that applauds endeavors to build the bottom line of a corporation rather than build our character, where utilitarian outcomes are prized over human ones, we succumb to an always on, continually judged and never enough expectation of...