[Each new tab feels like a choice: how do I want to spend my time?]
What a ’new tab page’ this is! I prefer queries (via keystroke launchers like Quicksilver or ‘Command-K’) over big lists, but this is beautifully personal and makes me drool; stable options can leverage muscle memory and reduce distractions. 👍🏽
Provokes me to wonder about social patterns and ‘formats’ like /now or ‘daily note’, ways of organizing that many people can practice and share so that we can all learn from each other.
[Soak cardboard in water for fifteen minutes, wrap around a glass jar, and remove just before dry. Use as a plant pot and place in soil to prevent root interference.]
Good luck finding books that somberly advise corporations on how to encourage a dangerous reliance on unsupervised individual inspiration.
A company needs to be able to treat its employees as interchangeable and expendable, both individually and collectively. It needs to be able to periodically layoff 17% of its workforce to cut its margin overhead by 1% and temporarily boost its stock price by 5%, without having to endure existential upheaval to its ongoing business processes. It needs to be able to double and redouble recklessly in size for the same dubious market reasons, without those people all piling up in the lobby where their chaos is visible from the street.
The key to these flexibilities, as we have understood at least since Henry Ford, is to formalize the operational roles so that their function in the overall system is symbolic and anonymous. As long as people are just units inserted into well-defined slots, the machinery doesn’t need to care who they are.
The secret truth of business advice is that it’s mostly about how to grimly extract residual value from the luck you already had, and the unearned love you were already unguardedly given, because there’s really no method for making more of it.
[I offer: space away from the rat-race to reflect, breathe more deeply, move deliberately; a good bullshit detector; place to practice, prepare, or role-play tough future conversations; help to find the right amount of stretch in your development goal without overdoing to short circuit progress; encouragement if you need someone telling you to quit your job.]
[Improve your interpersonal dynamics by seeing the relationship as something that can be co-designed in process rather than ‘agreed upon’.]
[My formal training is in engineering and agriculture. I coach because people ask me, not because I’m certified.]
[Smaller organizations might not be able to afford leadership coaching from professionals but can afford peer-to-pear from like-minded companions.]