If cash is king in financial matters, culture is king in relational matters. But compared to cold hard cash, culture—whatever it is—often feels fuzzy to practically minded folks. Culture doesn’t tend to respond to quarterly earnings deadlines, and yet it is far more important to short-term and long-term outcomes. It provides the underlying structure for what might be possible.
Read moreThe Consequences of Mal-formation: The Impact of One Person (Part 2)
One person can make all the difference in the world - or make a world of suffering. The consequences of mal-formation are serious and have tremendous reach.
Read moreThe Impact of One Person - Part 1
If we look a little more closely, our heroes were as ordinary as we are. Rosa Parks was just trying to ride a bus; Lincoln was just trying to keep the Union together; Ford was just trying to build a cost-effective car for the masses; and Anthony was just trying to get the vote for half of the population. Are these aims so far out of the ordinary that we might think those reaching for them are somehow different from the rest of us?
Read moreThe Three Levels of Impact
Everyone seems to be concerned about “impact” these days, so much so that a tortuous new adverb has arisen: “impactful.” Politicians stump about it, consultants analyze it, researchers theorize about it, and visionaries call for transformations of it. Whether the impact in question is social, environmental, or collective, the primary concern driving the impact conversation is exactly the same one driving the geologists’ naming of the Anthropocene era: that human beings are having unprecedented, and not entirely positive, impact on our planet, and particularly on the quality of other humans’ lives.
Read moreUnderstanding the Essentials of Human Experience
Outsourcing will work for a lot of things we don’t have time to do. But what if the “task” you’re trying to perform is your life?
Unlike preparing a meal or maintaining a car, the work of your life isn’t something you can just hand over to another person. There is no expert on your life except you. While some people know us well, and have insight into our lives, no other person is responsible for how my life turns out except for me. I simply cannot outsource my life to an expert.
So what if we are unsure or confused about how we are supposed to do this work of human life?
Read moreAn Age of Human Capital?
Let me propose that the Anthropocene does offer us something new: an opportunity to finally invest in those with the power to move our world in the direction of positive, sustainable change – you and me. Our friends and family. Our coworkers, employees, and neighbors. Human beings we know and love, or have yet to befriend. This could be the age of human capital, where we take ourselves, our communities, our organizations, and our institutions seriously as worthy of our most thoughtful and serious investments of resources.
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