I love Dan Pink's RSA talk on our mistaken assumptions about what makes good work possible.The subtitle of his talk could be 'Don't think you can manipulate people into making their most genuine contribution'.Paying bonuses for performance, argues Pink, works out only in very particular situations. Promise to reward people more for performing a mindless mechanical task, and often, yes, they'll find the wherewithal to do it better, or faster.But make bonuses the reason to do work that requires care, thoughtfulness, or imagination - especially if that's your primary method of engaging them - and you're most likely to see poorer results.I don't think this should surprise us. We know pretty quickly when we're being manipulated and it often makes us cynical and resentful.The very idea that bonuses would increase performance arises from the still-influential work of the behaviourist psychologists of the last century. They argued that the inner experience of human beings is irrelevant, and that we can decide what to do by looking just at outer stimulus and response patterns.In many organisations we're still caught up in the simplistic understanding of people that the behaviourists inspired. The consequence? The design of management practice based on the reward and punishment responses of animals such as rats.But we're human beings, with rich inner worlds that cannot be ignored just because they're hard to measure. We are brought to life by meaning, belonging, contribution and creativity. We're not machines, nor do we contribute any of our higher human faculties in response to a straightforwardly manipulative stimulus such as a bonus.When we're treated - or treat ourselves - as if we're something less than the complex, meaning-seeking beings that we are, it should be no surprise that we - and our work - are diminished.Pay people enough to have the issue of money be off the table, argues Pink. And then you need to ask deeper questions.Here's the animation from his talk, with thanks to Geraldine for introducing it to me.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc]
Photo Credit: Broo_am (Andy B) via Compfight cc
There are millions of books that you'll never read.Millions of films you'll never see.Places you'll never go to.People you'll never meet.Experiences you'll never have.Do you chase after what's unattainable with resentment and frustration, raging against life's limits? Or open in gratitude at life's richness?Here's George Steiner with a beautiful account of the move from fear to wonder on this very question, involving a fascinating story of the discovery and reburial of thousands of terracotta Chinese warriors.[youtube=http://youtu.be/Q1z3sMGYjNk]
In the 
When you're in the midst of a storm in life - some difficulty, confusion, fear, or uncertainty - it's easy to imagine that something must have gone terribly wrong.After all, aren't you meant to be successful? Aren't you meant to be on top of life? Aren't you meant to be in control? To have it all figured out by now?And if you're in trouble isn't it clear that it's your fault?The narrative of personal striving and personal success that so many of us have taken up as the benchmark for our lives doesn't help here. It's too individualistic, too solitary. It assumes you have infinite power to shape your life. And that your success or failure, your happiness or your despair are down to you alone. It's not a big enough story to account for the kind of difficulty you're in, to account for being a participant in a world that is so mysterious and so much bigger than you are.No, there's a bigger, more generous account of finding yourself in life's storm that goes far beyond blame and fault, far beyond success and failure. Haruki Murakami has found the words to express it beautifully and clearly, in his 
Could it be that it's time for you to give up looking good so you can be real instead?I'm not saying this lightly.Five summers ago, I found myself rendered momentarily speechless, mid-conversation, as a dear friend and I walked together for lunch. A few minutes later, flat on my back on the pavement, heart pounding, short of breath, mind racing.I knew for certain only after a few days - but had an inkling as it happened - that an undiagnosed blood clot that had been forming in my leg for some time had at that moment broken loose from its moorings.Terror, love, longing, hope, confusion.I called home while we waited for the paramedics to arrive."I'm fine," I said. "There's nothing to be worried about".Not, "I'm scared.". Not, "Please help me". Not, "I don't know if I'm going to be ok"."I'm fine".It was a hot June afternoon, blue skies, but there must have been clouds as I remember watching a seagull wheel high overhead against a background of grey-white."I'm fine".Just when I most needed help and connection I played my most familiar, habitual 'looking good' hand - making sure others around me had nothing to be worried about. A hand I've played repeatedly since I was a child.Even in the most obviously life-threatening situation I had yet experienced: "I'm fine". Too afraid to be seen for real, to be seen as something other than my carefully nurtured image of myself.It was there, on the pavement, that I started to understand in a new way the cost of holding myself back from those I 
An unchangeable feature of life is that, at every moment, you find yourself inescapably in some situation or other - perhaps one that you did not choose.And however magnificent or terrible it is, you are, conclusively, just here, at this moment in the life that you are living.No manner of denial (and all the suffering that comes with it) can change that your life continues from this moment, this particular configuration, and not from another.And so acceptance of life - as opposed to fighting life - is not 'putting up with things' but responding fully from where you are. Not pretending to yourself or to others that you are somewhere else.Every situation, however glorious, however unwelcome, has its own possibilities. And you have precisely this hand to play in whatever way you can.Many paths lead from this place.Will you go to sleep to yourself, or step in to this, the one and only life you have?
Love - genuine love for anything - is so often left out of the discourse of organisational life.Apparently it's not serious enough for business.Sometimes we'll allow ourselves passion - a word which is allowed, I think, because it sells us to others with its promise of energy and heat, commitment and making things happen. (We're so tied up with endlessly making things happen that we've forgotten everything else that conspires to make it possible).And we'll allow ourselves cynicism and skepticism, moods which distance us from one another and give us a feeling of superiority (a kind of pseudo-sophistication in which we believe we have greater insight than everyone else around us, who simply can't see what we can see).Frustration and resignation are also welcomed in many organisations, because serious work is apparently meant to be difficult all the time and both of these moods, reminding us of our difficulty, tell us that we must be doing it right.But love - genuine love? Deep, heartfelt love for something or someone that brings out our integrity, moves us, has us speak truth even when it's inconvenient, draws us out of ourselves, can touch people with something beyond manipulation or self-interest? How often do we allow that in ourselves or in others?We treat love with disdain.And we're much the poorer for it.
Careful and care are quite different from one another, but we often confuse them.Careful: