Mental toughness

Many studies have found that the most successful people are not the ones with the most intelligence or talent, but the ones with with the highest levels of mental toughness. Mental toughness, it turns out, is a skill that can be built by a series of small but regular wins.

So let’s say you want to become a more ethical leader. You start by defining what that means to you. It might be leading a training session on conflict of interests instead of letting HR do it. It might be sharing an ethical decision that you made in the company’s monthly newsletter. It might be recognizing an employee who made a good call as part of your weekly all-hands meeting. Whatever it is, the key is to find something easy, something that doesn’t require motivation, and to do it consistently. As you accumulate these small wins, you will assume the identity of an ethical leader. Once you truly think of yourself as an ethical leader, you will be emboldened and move from small wins to big ones.

What small win can you commit to for next week, and every week thereafter?

A year from now, you’ll wish you had started today

The obstacle in the path becomes the path.
Ryan Holiday

Many individuals have made the most out of the pandemic. The time not spent commuting or working has made room for learning a new skill, a new language, or a new instrument. For starting a podcast, a YouTube channel, or writing a book.

Others have spent these first 6 months watching Netflix.

When the pace picks up again, will we look back at this time and wish we had spent it differently? Will we have more to say than “I was stuck at home” and “I spent a lot of time on Zoom”?

Even in good times companies die because they keep doing what they did last year. Imagine what fate awaits them if they hold on to the status quo in troubled times.

Business is war

“We must undergo a hard winter training and not rush into things for which we haven’t prepared.”
Epictetus, Discourses, 1.2.32

Back in the days when war was a series of summertime raids, soldiers spent their winters in training. Every day of the winter.

Today’s employee is like a soldier. When at the front lines, she is interacting with colleagues, dealing with a supplier, negotiating with a customers, or meeting with a government official. Ethical bullets are fired at her and compliance grenades lobbed at her. The key to winning each raid is in the training she received previously.

In too many companies, the training is provided once, during a kind of boot camp after enlistment. In other companies, the training is repeated but once-a-year. Rare are the companies that prepare their soldiers for battle every winter day by embedding their values in every act and every communication.

Which is why so many soldiers are wounded or die in battle, and why so many companies lose wars.

Collaborate

Pay attention to what will go wrong today.

From the little aggravations to the big problems.

Then see how a bit more collaboration and communication might have prevented some of these issues.

Slow down. Collaborate. Get more done.

What I miss

I have been working from home since March 16.

I don’t miss the commute. I enjoy not having to shave on occasion. I’m saving money on gasoline and dry cleaners.

I do miss colleagues stopping by my office to discuss a project or just to say hello. Each occasion produce a small dopamine rush. Small, but still greater than the one I get with a Zoom invitation via email.

The longer this lasts, the more it will affect us. In many societies, we were taught to greet each other with handshakes, kisses, or embraces; to offer coffee, tea, and biscuits; to offer a seat or a cushion; and, more subtilely, to smile and speak warmly. All of these practices are diminished or lost when meeting online.

And we miss it.

The impact is real and it will get worse with each passing month. Let us be aware of it, acknowledge it, and vow to treat each other as well as possible.

Dashboards and scorecards (haiku)

Red, yellow, and green

can be used to provide help

or to weaponize

Ethical challenges for new business models

According to Peter Diamandis, “some of the most potent innovation taking place today does not involve breakthrough technologies… but rather the creation of fundamentally new business models.”

The question that E&C professionals should ask now is “what are the compliance and ethical risks associated with these new models?”

Here are some thoughts:

The Crowd Economy (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) – Labor rights
The Free/Data Economy (Facebook, Google, etc.) – Privacy rights
The Smartness Economy (Amazon, SalesForce, etc.) – Loss of jobs
Closed-Loop Economies (The Plastic Bank, Eileen Fisher Renew, etc.) – Affordability
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (Augur, Steem, etc.) – Liability
Multiple World Models (Second Life, Call of Duty, etc.) – Addiction
Transformation Economy (Burning Man, CrossFit, etc.) – Truth in advertizing

Will your business be affected by these new models? Of course it will.

Are you getting ready?

Poster idea

“You wouldn’t hand over the car keys to your teenager without a talk about drunk driving. Don’t approve your employee’s attendance to a trade show without a refresher on antitrust.”

Any graphic designer out there who wants to turn this into a poster?

Worth a try?

Business people often resist ethics and compliance initiatives because they are not convinced that they work. Or so they say.

These are the same people that try unproven selling techniques, just in case they work.

Same words, different meaning

I read The Daily Stoic every morning.

I have been doing so for the last 4 years. The daily meditation I read this morning is the same one I read on August 20th the 3 previous years. It is familiar by now. But because I am not the same person I was one year ago, that meditation offers something new.

Your employees feel the same effect when they hear you speak of the company values. Do not assume that because they’ve heard you speak of their importance in the past that there is no point in repeating the exercise. Your employees are not the same people they were before the pandemic or before witnessing the murder of George Floyd. When you speak of safety and respect today, they don’t hear what they heard last year.