The Pursuit of Flow and Why It is Important To Work and Personal Satisfaction

There is a scene in the movie “The Hustler” where Fast Eddie, played by Paul Newman, says: “It’s a great feeling, boy, it’s a real great feeling when you’re right and you KNOW you’re right. It’s like all of a sudden I got oil in my arm. The pool cue is a part of me… you don’t have to look, you just KNOW. You make shots that nobody’s ever made before.” What the character is describing is being in a state of flow—that enthralled state, when your level of skill matches the level of the challenge. You become so engrossed in what you do that you forget to eat. You escape time. We’ve all been there. It’s what athletes call “being in the zone” and what musicians refer to as “being in the groove.” The concept of flow is the brainchild of psychologist Mihali Csikszentmihalyi. In an interesting talk a few years ago, Csikszentmihalyi talks about the concept of flow and about his more recent book, Good Business: Flow and the Making of Meaning. In it he writes that success is being involved in an endeavor that helps others and, at the same time, makes you feel happy.

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Break Group Think, Outsiders Can Help You to See Things - Paul Sloane

How can you break out of the group-think that affects most large organizations? How can you escape from the corporate frameworks that shape discussions and ideas? Philips is moving from a high-volume electronics manufacturere to a design-led, lifestyle technology company. It needs help to get there so it set up a 'simplicity board'. Philips reckoned it needed a fresh perspective from creative types with no ties to the company. So it formed the simplicity board, a group of external specialists in health care, fashion, design, and architecture. "Philips was too inward-looking," says Andrea Ragnetti, Chief Marketing Offier. "To really embed simplicity into the company's DNA, we needed an element of vision."

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Groupthink, Self Serving Subordinates and Uncertainty - Can They Be Overcome

In this article, Martin Evans considers the barriers to accurate information gathering in large organizations. “I expect to get valid information … I can’t make good decisions unless I get valid information” George W. Bush, April 13th 2004. George Bush’s cry is echoed by every organizational manager in the world. Looking back on the Presidency of George W. Bush we can see many information failures. Every manager would like to be sure that the information received was both timely and accurate. Every good manager knows it’s their responsibility to make sure that information received is timely and accurate. Despite his Yale education, George W. Bush did not learn this. Every good manager knows about the three major barriers to the realization of good information: group think, self-serving subordinates, and uncertainty absorption. Despite his Harvard Business School Education, George W. Bush failed to grasp this. Good managers are proactive to ensure that these barriers are overcome. Despite his years of management experience, George W. Bush did not learn this. In this article I will deal with the three barriers:

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Should Leaders Frighten or Inspire? - Harvard Business Review

Is it easier to motivate people to change by scaring them or by inspiring them? And is it more effective to marshal data points, or to craft a narrative? I'm at the Imagine Solutions conference in Naples, Florida, and change is on everyone's mind. But though we're ostensibly debating issues like health care, the environment, energy, and the economy, I keep picking up on the meta-debate about what kind of leadership these issues require. Dean Ornish, for instance, spoke Monday morning about the motivational power of focusing on the positive. He's a doctor who champions preventive medicine (he's the founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute). He lambasted what he called the false choices between what is "fun" and what is healthy, and instead called on medical leaders who focus on the benefits — the fun side effects, as it were — of living a healthier life. And to convince us, he presented intense quantitative data culled from his research: tumors arrested (and by how much), heart disease reversed (and how quickly), genes expressed and unexpressed (with color-coded diagrams.) (Yes, living healthier can actually turn harmful genes "off." But I digress.)

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How Much Change Would You Settle For? from Harvard Business Review

At the Imagine Solutions conference, the watchword was change. Whether they wanted to bring down the national debt (like Niall Ferguson), reform Washington (like David Walker), halt global climate change (like Carter Roberts), or reinvent health care (like Patch Adams), everyone agreed that the world needed changing, even if they didn't quite agree on the specifics of what that change should look like. Yet it became clear as the conference progressed that the speakers also disagreed on how much change was enough. When tackling daunting problems in health care, the environment, politics, or the economy, can incremental adjustments make a real difference? Or is anything less than total transformation not even worth the effort?

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