The Culture+ Blog

The biggest flaw I see with work training initiatives is that there is little (or no) investment after the training is over.  This is the most critical time!  Imagine you are learning how to swim. You go to the pool and an instructor shows you what to do. After the 30...

Wanna be bad? Take one thing on that 150 item to-do list you maintain and cross it off... Without actually doing it.  How does the thought of that make you feel? A little uneasy? A little intriguing?  I try to do this once per week. If you keep a long list(s) of...

Tony Robbins says that you never get what you want, you only get what you tolerate. The word "tolerate" has a particular connotation that has caused me to miss the point for a few years. When I phrased it this way, "we get our standards" something clicked.  Here's...

Getting somebody on your team to open up to you means you are doing it right. If you have a team member who is sharing their life goals with you--and those goals clearly can't be achieved by working on your team forever--then you are doing it right. If you have a team...

The old joke after reading a fortune cookie fortune out loud is to add "between the sheets" to the end of whatever it says. "You will make someone very happy." (Between the sheets.) The next time you hear somebody at work complaining about somebody else from a...

It's summer in the US. I live on the tee box of a local golf course. It's been busy. The tee box for any hole is where golfers start. The goal, for the unfamiliar, is to get the ball from the tee box to the hole with the fewest possible hits. For any golfer who has...

This week the schedule gods blessed me with a few days that had absolutely no meetings. Usually I block out Fridays for no meetings but the day usually ends up getting stuffed with administrative, not-fun work. But to have a Tuesday clear? That was a real treat. ...

Have you ever been in the zone? The zone is that place where time seems to disappear and we really submerge into the task at hand. I love getting into the zone. I love learning. I love the process of becoming a craftsman. And all of this? It's a problem. Maybe it's a...

Go long on your work relationships. What does that mean? I once heard someone say that if you can't picture yourself working with someone for 15 years, then don't work with them for a single day. While not exactly a Lao Tzu-ish observation, there is buried a savory...

All of the bumper stickers on the car I was following this morning focused on boiling down a single complex topic into pure stupid. I felt myself getting dumber. There was an upside, though. They sparked a thought. I thought about whether any of us apply bumper...

I recently reread a magazine that was five years old. It was in a stack of other magazines here in the house. I just happened upon it. The novelty of finding something exactly five years old (the August 2014 edition) was not wasted. The magazine is five years old and...

Part of the difficulty with harvesting institutional knowledge from someone who is retiring is capturing the "feel" component.  Once you have been in a job for some time, you develop a feel for what to do. It's hard to quantify, and it's hard to explain to others. If...