We can truly reach great heights! ;-)
(Credit Photo: Rebecca and Itzchak)
We can truly reach great heights! ;-)
(Credit Photo: Rebecca and Itzchak)
Rising To Great Heights
Mental calisthenics.
It takes discipline.
Got to work those neurons! ;-)
(Credit Photo: Michelle Blumenthal)
Read, Read, Read
Then you also know what you can't do.
While our dreams and imagination can be "the sky's the limit,"
The reality is we are human and we have to learn, grow, and make progress incrementally.
Still it's a fight every day to get stronger as people and as souls. ;-)
(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
Strong and Knowledgeable
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is really about fear vs. humiliation. The Jews are fearful of the Palestinians and the Palestinians feel humiliated by the Jews. The Jewish people collectively suffer post-traumatic stress and anxiety disorders after millennia of persecution culminating in the Holocaust and multiple Wars in Israel against far greater Arab forces. Further, this has been perpetuated by decades of terrorism and Intifadas that have left the Jews feeling vulnerable in their own land of Israel. The net effect of this Jewish history and of being surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs, many resentful and angry, is that Jews are naturally afraid. At the same time, the Palestinians, as part of the greater Arabs, feel humiliated after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the carving up of their lands by the West and the colonialism and occupation that followed by Britain and France. More recently, the Palestinians feel humiliated by the founding of the State of Israel amidst the multitude of Arab lands of the Middle of East, as well as by the barrier wall and regular checkpoints that protects Israel from terrorist intruders, by the West Bank settlements (and actually by Jews anywhere in Israel), and by general Israeli military control over the territories.There is hope that in time and with G-d's help, the opposing forces of fear and humiliation will weaken and thereby become less oppositional. At that miraculous time, please G-d in the near future, the factors that prior resulted in a cosmic explosion of war, terror, Jihad, and Intifada will dissipate. Then instead of suicide bombers and terror tunnels and walls and checkpoints, we can have hope for the arrival of a beautiful white dove with an olive branch of peace that knows no bitter boundaries of Jew or Palestinian anymore.
Unstoppable Fear Meets Immovable Humiliation
Birthing An IT System
You Can't Eat The Elephant
"Everybody hates the status quo
but nobody wants to change."
Change Everybody Loves To Hate
"Those who think they know EVERYthing
annoy those of us who do."
"I know nothing and I can prove it." ;-)(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
The All-Knowing (Not)
It Takes A Village
"Oh my that trunk of his would make a great clothing hook."
Perception Is Reality
Left-Handed Screwdriver
When Incremental Improvement Isn't Enough
Making Change Probable
Seeing Is Believing
Perfect Is The Enemy of Good
Reading is Love
Employees need to be motivated to perform. No, not just with money, and not even with a pat of the back (although both can go a long way to demonstrate appreciation for a job well done).
People need to know that their efforts have meaning and effect—i.e. that they are not in vain. This can have some of the biggest impact of all on motivating behavior, because people inherently want to be productive human beings and for their life to have some ultimate significance. This concept was best portrayed by Victor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor who wrote In Search of Meaning, and it is the basis of logotherapy, which has been shown to help sufferers of terminal illnesses better cope with the remainder of their lives.
When people at work feel that they have no chance to succeed, they may cease to find meaning in their efforts. This can lead them to decrease their engagement at work instead of going all out to prove themselves. As the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent article, this is what happens when golfers compete with extremely superior rivals like Tiger Woods, and they just “cave.”
Why this de-motivational reaction from people who care about doing their best?
From an IT perspective, this is like an Integrated Definition Function Model (IDEF 0) that examines input, process, output, and outcome: When loss is viewed as a predestined outcome, the process is seen as meaningless, and the input therefore as wasted. In the face of meaninglessness, people recoil to save their energy for something they feel that they can really have a shot at, rather than invest in something that they see as going nowhere.
If the above is true, then, why do some people “fight to the death” when their “backs are against the wall”?
My grandfather used to say, “Where there is life, there is hope.” Some people are able to confront what seem like insurmountable obstacles, and fight their way forward anyway.
This is the core theme of the “Rocky” character and the incredible success of the movie series. In every movie, Rocky represents the determination to succeed against all odds.
I believe that the essence of life is the search for an opportunity to make a meaningful difference, and when one is able to make a difference, that is inherently motivating. (And so of course, the opposite is true.)
So if you are a leader, and your employees are demoralized, how can you engage them so that they feel like their work makes a real and significant difference? Here are ways that work:
As a leader, what better way to motivate and drive personal and organizational success then to provide genuine opportunity to contribute of ourselves in a meaningful way, in a way where our efforts have an impact, are valued and valuable, and where everyone can succeed.
Five Ways To Motivate Employees With Meaning
Breaking the Organization Free of Dysfunction
When we think creatively and “out of the box”, we break the mental bounds that constrain our ability to go beyond what we know today and build capabilities that were unimaginable just the day before.
Yet, innovation is not like creation. G-d creates something from nothing. Man builds on the ideas of those who came before us—this is incrementalism.
And doing so, we are able to go beyond our own individual human limitations.
Incrementalism is a force multiplier. It is like layering one new thought, one change, one innovation on top on another and another. With each incremental development, we as a society are able to go beyond those who came before us.
Of course, some innovations are more evolutionary and some more incredibly revolutionary, but for all there are influences that underpin their development and they are there even if we cannot readily see them.
In short though, we are constantly changing as a society and as individuals—for better or possibly, for worse.
In the introduction to the novel, The Prey, by Michael Crichton, the author talks about the how everything—“every living plant, insect, and animal species”--is constantly evolving and warns of the complexity, uncertainty, and possible dire consequences if we do not manage change responsibly.
““The notion that the world around us is continuously evolving is a platitude; we rarely grasp its full implications…The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything that we do.”
I think the point is that even if we can envision or test the consequences of innovation one, two, three or however many steps forward, we cannot know the limitless possible downstream effects of a change that we initiate.
Crichton states: Unfortunately, our species has demonstrated a striking lack of caution in the past. It is hard to imagine that we will behave differently in the future.”
We don’t have to look too far to see how we have irresponsibly used many innovations in our times, whether they be complex and risky investment instruments that have led to the current financial crisis, medical products that have had serious unintended side effects resulting in serious injury and fatalities, and of course our endless thirst for and usage of fossil fuels and the general disregard for our planet and the negative effects on our environment such as global warming and pollution to name just a couple.
Crichton warns that “sometime in the twenty-first century, our self-deluded recklessness will collide with our growing technological power.”
The warning is particularly apropos in light of the ever increasing rate of change enabled by and manifested in various technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, nuclear technology and information technology.
With each new advance in our technological prowess come risks of these new tools getting away from us and causing harm. For example, nuclear technologies have provided weapons of mass destruction that we struggle to contain; biotechnology has stirred concerns in terms of cloning, mutations, and deadly pathogens; nanotechnology stirs fears of toxic microscopic organisms that can easily get into our bodies, and IT viruses and cyber warfare that threaten our world of bits and bytes as we have come to know and rely for just about every daily activity we are involved in.
The point is not for us to be scared into mental stasis and inaction, but to be cognizant of the potential for serious side effects of changes and to take appropriate safeguards to mitigate those.
Innovation is exciting but it can also be seriously scary. Therefore, we need to be brave and bold in our thinking and actions, but at the same time we need to be cautious and act responsibly.
What this means in real life is that when new ideas are introduced, we need to evaluate them carefully so that we understand the range of benefits and risks they pose.
While it is not very sexy to be the voice of caution, great leaders know how to encourage new thinking while reining in potentially dangerous consequences.
Kudos to the Bean Counters