Mindframe

The Declaration of Independence famously champions "the pursuit of happiness". For many, joy and personal fulfillment are one and the same. So what is the secret to happiness? It's a question long pondered by history's great philosophical minds.  Frequently, it's framed in terms of attempting to live a more spiritual life. But Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology and education at University of Chicago, takes a different tack. In his book, Finding Flow, Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chick-sent-me-high"), suggests that the key to living a happy life is to habituate a process of personal challenge aimed at enhancing the intensity of experience. By that, he means that when pursuing any activity, we should practice the following four principles: Establish a clear and compatable set of goals  Have a method for deriving immediate feedback  to gauge your effectiveness Work at peak skill level to master  the significant challenge you...

Leonardo Da Vinci was born in Vinci, April 15 th , 1452.   In his lifetime, he painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper . He was a sculptor, musician, engineer, scientist and inventor. His sketchpads were filled with designs for helicopters, tanks, parachutes, paddleboats, bicycles, and even a repeating rifle. By the time he died sixty-seven years later, he was considered to be one of the greatest minds of his century. Today there is plenty of support for the idea that Da Vinci might be, in fact, the greatest mind of all time. So what was it about Da Vinci’s brain that made him so unique?   Michael J. Gelb, writer, lecturer and Da Vinci scholar, believes he knows the answer. In How to Think like Leonardo Da Vinci, Gelb suggests that the Maestro followed seven principles that are part of the secret to his success. Gelb summarizes the principles like this: “Curiostia—An insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning. Dimos...

In Daniel Pink’s new book, To Sell is Human,  he argues that selling is a natural byproduct of living in groups. If you want to make a living and get along with others, sooner or later, you'll find yourself at the junction of commerce and persuasion. And whether you're a senator making the case for a bill, an accountant trying desperately to convince Steve from the sixth floor to hand in his expense report already , or a job interviewee promoting yourself, everyone's working to close that deal. Hence, we are all salespeople. Sales is often seen as one of the dark arts. The word conjures visions of men in loud plaid jackets with slicked-back hair, lying in wait behind rows of shiny cars with misleading prices soaped across the windshields. Or the insurance hawker insisting that the only way to prove you love your family is to double down on a juicy term life policy. Wielded correctly, fear can be a lethal weapon. Buyer beware! And this might be it in a nutshe...

There is a special dialect unique to the corporate world. If you work at a big company, your brain might at this moment be reflexively conjuring phrases like think outside the box, best in class, customer-driven, emerging technologies and, my favorite, win-win , the latter being the antithesis of modern day sports. However, what I'm talking about goes beyond buzzwords. I refer to the mythical language of meeting rooms, where no project is ever hampered by constraints on money, time and personnel, thanks to magical forces like “can-do attitude". People often say the cruelest part of growing up is when we lose our childlike innocence and our ability to make-believe.  The jury's still out on innocence, but listen to anyone with sales projections for the upcoming year and you will quickly realize that pretending is alive and well. Meeting rooms are where great ideas are hatched and untenable promises made. The harsh, sunlit world of the outside is where they go to d...

" Metric" is a kind of sexed up word for measurement, popular among the corporate crowd.   The interesting thing about "metric" is that it has moved beyond its institutional role, denoting a specific calculation, to one that implies actual value. I can evaluate your sales output in dollars, but judging the impact of education on a sales force is a Herculean task.  To that end, when budget time rolls around, a ‘soft asset’ like education is frequently eliminated.  The devaluation of education is a common theme in corporate America, where the spreadsheet reigns supreme. The operating assumption is that if it can’t be measured, it is expendable. Yet there is an obvious flaw here. Take, for example, a patient waiting in the emergency room with a migraine headache. Migraines can cause excruciating, near-unbearable pain. No one would argue they don't exist, but how does one go about measuring just how much it hurts? Medical institutions sometimes attemp...