Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.
Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing toward the horizon.
In large organizations there are discrete functions. I do this; you do that. I swim in my lane; you swim in your lane. That can be very effective for certain processes and in certain stable conditions. But it doesn’t work in unstable conditions.
When the reward is the activity itself – deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one’s best – there are no shortcuts.
Today it’s economically crucial and personally rewarding to create something that is also beautiful, whimsical, or emotionally engaging.
The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic ‘right-brain’ thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t.
The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road. Indeed, most of the scandals and misbehavior that have seemed endemic to modern life involve shortcuts.
My generation’s parents told their children, ‘Become an accountant, a lawyer, or an engineer; that will give you a solid foothold in the middle class.’ But these jobs are now being sent overseas. So in order to make it today, you have to do work that’s hard to outsource, hard to automate.
The right brain is finally being taken seriously.
I tend to pull nuggets out of many books – rather than having a handful of books that serve as guiding lights.
Money can extinguish intrinsic motivation, diminish performance, crush creativity, encourage unethical behavior, foster short-term thinking, and become addictive.
Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.
One aspect of play is the importance of laughter, which has physiological and psychological benefits. Did you know that there are thousands of laughter clubs around the world? People get together and laugh for no reason at all!
There’s an idea out there that salespeople have actually been obliterated by the Internet, which is just not supported by the facts.
In the past thirty years we have learned more about the workings of the human brain than in all of previous history.
The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas.
Experimentalists never know when their work is finished.
The teacher showed us how to see proportions, relationships, light and shadow, negative space, and space between space – something I never noticed before! In one week, I went from not knowing how to draw to sketching a detailed portrait. It literally changed the way I see things...
Carry a notebook and write down examples of good and poor design. After a week, you’ll begin to realize that nearly everything is the product of a design decision.
To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources – not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.