I said a while back that I would link to my posts at The Slow Hunch given its slightly new direction. But for whatever reason, I’ve totally forgotten to link to the past several posts.
So, instead of blowing up DR with multiple posts simply linking to another blog, I’ll provide the links below with a brief description of the post. That way, all 3 readers of my blog can catch up if they’ve fallen behind:
- “The Church of Starbucks” — Churches tend to teach things pertaining to character and self-control. Similarly, Starbucks’ business model focuses on developing its employees’ willpower by providing proper training and autonomy. Drawn largely from Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit and featuring a brief video presentation by the same author.
- “Freedom to Flourish” — The Institute of Faith, Work, and Economics is think tank that researches the intersection of the three subjects in its name. For July 4, I posted their excellent and, for me, moving video titled “Freedom to Flourish.” As the video’s narrator begins, “Our lives are not divided into two halves with one part being sacred and another part secular. Worship is not reserved only for Sunday morning, but for Monday morning as well.”
- “Do What You Love” — Using an article in the leftist magazine Jacobin as a springboard, I talk about how the work mantra “do what you love” robs individuals of the potential to make their labors meaningful and to experience “worship through corporeality”: the sacred in the mundane. Plus, I contrast Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech with that of David Foster Wallace.
- “Don Bradley & the Sanctification of Progress” — Mormon historian Don Bradley presented a paper at the 2014 Conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association titled “Mormonism: The Sanctification of Human Progress.” The full video is provided in the post along with some of my favorite quotations from it. It has a lot of overlap with my own paper (written and presented by fellow DR blogger Allen Hansen) on worship through corporeality.
- “Alain de Botton on Work” — Author Alain de Botton has a book written about everyday work (one I haven’t read yet). The brief post features a clip of de Botton discussing work and its connection to the human quest for meaning.
- “Meeting Core Needs” — A NYT piece discussed the benefits of meeting employees’ four core needs: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. Ways of meeting them included consistent physical renewal, the feeling of being valued, the chance to focus on one task at a time, and a sense of purpose. Research like this helps remind us that corporations are in fact people and should therefore be managed as such.
- “Management Lessons from Dr. Who: Robert Sutton Edition” — Season 8 of the Doctor Who reboot began this August, starring Peter Capaldi as the new face of the Doctor. In this post, I weave together management insights from Stanford’s Robert Sutton with the outlook of Capaldi’s Doctor in the season premiere “Deep Breath.” Managers/leaders can’t just take a top-down, big picture stance. They must embrace a bottom-up, detail-oriented approach as well.
And there you have it.