We’ve all heard it said: “Good is good enough”, or “Leave well enough alone”. Those sayings convey a form of popular wisdom — the idea that there are times in life when aiming for a higher level of perfection can be counterproductive and that things should just be left the way they are. My native French has a very similar saying (“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”) loosely adapted from something that philosopher Montesquieu famously wrote three hundred years ago.
There are many different ways to look at commercial enterprises. If you purchase something from a company, you will tend to look at it from the standpoint of a customer. If you’re retired and living off your savings, you may look at the same organization from the standpoint of a small shareholder.
Transferable skills, as people usually think of them, are abilities developed in one context that can be readily applied in a different setting. You may, for instance, learn how to manage interpersonal conflicts as a camp counselor and leverage that skill later in life as a team leader.
I recently came across an article by David Brooks of the New York Times titled “The Strange Failure of the Educated Elite” in which the author draws a sharp contrast between a moral system based on individual achievement, on one hand, and one based on moral character, on the other:
I was exactly twenty-six years old when I was offered the most important piece of career advice I ever received. My wife and I had recently moved halfway across the country so that I could take up an assistant manager role in the training department of the company where I had been a field advisor for the previous two years.
We often hear about the poor state of financial literacy amongst young people, indeed across the population in general. It’s an issue that many people, organizations and governments are keenly interested in and one that the media takes an interest in from time to time.
One very important but often overlooked aspect of effective collaboration is the requirement to engage with people on their own level, in a way that is mutually beneficial.
On a winter day in my early thirties, a few years less than twenty years ago, I had the misfortune of slipping and falling on an icy sidewalk. The next day, the pain had become almost unbearable and I noticed some numbness in one of my legs. I checked myself into a local hospital, where after an MRI and some other tests, I was told that I had, unequivocally, ruptured a disc in my lower back.
You might find this strange for somebody in my line of work but if you were to look at a list of the books I read over the past year, you would not find a single business book.
Are negative emotions sapping your ability to detect the ripples large and small that emanate from all around you, and undermining your ability to carry out your responsibilities in the most effective way you can?
