Another Good Reason to Meditate

by | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms, Stress Management

 

Dr. Peter Suedfeld, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and an expert in human cognition. …told us that creativity is a “very mysterious thing” that “exists in pretty much everyone” — but that there are indeed ways to improve it. One method he has studied extensively is what he calls the Restricted Environmental Stimulation Technique (REST) — putting people into places with no light or outside stimuli.

“What I’ve found,” he said, “is that far from making people crazy, moderate deprivation lowers blood pressure, improves mood, and makes people more creative.”

From: “Outside the Box”: The Inside Story
By Martin Kihn, Fast Company, June 2005

Found in:

IDEAS IN THE NEWS
A biweekly publication of MeansBusiness
Vol. VI No. 8 — June 29, 2005 

 

 

See free, easy Meditation Instructions on this blog.

 

Meditation for Managers video

 

What would you give up to truly give?

by | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Leadership Development, Quotes and Aphorisms, Team Manager Skills

 

 

It is rare indeed that people give.

 

Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is the system of reality in what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself – that is to say, risking oneself.

 

If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.

 

–The Price of the Ticket:
Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985
by James Baldwin
Page 370

 

 

Jeffrey Pfeffer

by | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms, Team Manager Skills

 

This was a guy in one of their [Men’s Wearhouse] stores in the Northwest who was an exceptional salesperson. But the company’s managers believe in the concept of team selling — they believe in this idea of human development that you always succeed when your colleagues around you succeed, and that you ought to participate in all this training. And this guy said, “I’m not going to do any of this stuff.”

 

The company’s big measures are the number of transactions and the dollars of sales per transaction. This guy was way above on the number of transactions but not doing very well on dollars per transaction. What that meant was that people would come in the store and he would steal them. Finally, they said to this guy, “We want you to get with the program,” and he wouldn’t.

 

So they fired him — and guess what? Sales in the store went up 30 percent. His replacement, of course, did not sell as much as he did. But everybody else in the store sold more. In other words, he was bringing everybody else down. And you see this in other organizations where there is one star.

 

—Jeffrey Pfeffer
Strategy & Business

 

Freedom = We Do Not Know What We Are Doing

by | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms

 

If we could get to know all the consequences of our actions history would be nothing but an idyllic and constant harmony of free wills, or the infallible unfolding of a rational design. We would then always act rationally, that is, we would not act at all, since we would simply follow a pre-established and sterile pattern. But then we would not be free.

 

We are free, however, and this means literally that we do not know what we are doing.

 

—Nicola Chiaromonte