Here’s an interesting question for you: Should you run your team at work as a high-performance athletic program, or as a community sport club? Stop. Don’t answer just yet. I know, I know: You’re a high-performance type of person.
Social distancing measures have been in full effect for weeks and legions of people have retreated – more or less happily – to the relative safety of their homes. Workplaces and public spaces that used to teem with people lie eerily empty and many employees – fortunate ones for whom telecommuting proved possible – have carried on with their professional lives in a strange virtual world where newly disembodied organizations large and small continue to operate.
What we are attempting, as far as I know, has never been done. Some microorganisms such as yeasts, fungi and bacteria can go completely dormant for periods of time that can stretch over thousands of years, a phenomenon known as super-long anabiosis: a glacier moves in, the bacteria go into a deep freeze; the glacier pulls back ten thousand years later, the bacteria go back to their business.
Society as we know it is a vast tapestry of overlapping organizations – some private, some public – that serve to structure human activities and human relationships into an edifice of intricate complexity.
December 1, 2009. It was on this very day exactly ten years ago that I reported for duty with my new employer. Ten years later, I still work for the same company so today officially marks my 10th work anniversary.
Allow me to start with a disclaimer: This article is a full-on recommendation for a little gem of a book titled “Virtue at Work” by Geoff Moore, Professor of Business Ethics at Durham University in the UK.
We spend our days toiling at this or that, sometimes alone, sometimes with others. We know the proximate reasons for those everyday actions: we go to work because, well, we have to pay the bills; we interact with our colleagues because we have a job to do and that’s how you get things done.
I don’t know how much time you spend thinking about succession planning but I think about it a lot. In just a few days, as it does every September, our judo club will be welcoming
Ask yourself this question and answer it honestly — nobody need ever know how you answered: Do you find yourself being driven mostly by the necessity to abide by your duties and obligations, or by the desire to do your very best at everything you do?
Doing the right thing is not as easy as just saying it. It can often require real courage to do what is right, and humans are notoriously fallible in this front. But another, equally daunting obstacle stands in the way of what is good and just – one that we have likely been struggling with for as long as our species has had a notion of right and wrong: How exactly, pray tell, does one determine what is the right thing to do in a given situation?
