Pros

• Improves communication
• Increases workflow
• Can Eliminate markers of rank and occupation
• Allows flexibility of office layout
• Encourages teamwork, sharing and learning by observation
• Savings of 20 per cent or more on office fit-out costs
• Creates common culture
• Reduces real estate costs
• Reduces energy use and cost

Cons

• Stress and insecurity from lack of privacy
• Constant distractions from nearby conversations and noise
• Feelings of dehumanisation in smaller workstations with ill-defined boundaries
• Increased conflict between workers in shared workspaces
• Low job satisfaction, leading to higher absenteeism and staff turnover
• Stress contributing to high blood pressure
• Increased risk of colds, flu
• Low productivity and poor job satisfaction

Dan Ariely experiments on people to understand what is truly motivating

Dan is a Behavioural economist at Duke Univeristy  were hee, he’s aligned with three departments (business, economics and cognitive neuroscience); he’s also a visiting professor in MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences and a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. His hope that studying and understanding the decision-making process can help people lead better, more sensible daily lives.

Dan has written two best selling books, Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality.

Nigel Marsh gave and excellent talk at TEDx Sydney recently on Work Life Balance.

Marsh is currently Regional Group CEO of Young and Rubicam Brands for Australia & New Zealand. Nigel has worked with an enormous variety of businesses including a number of the world’s top companies  -Virgin, McDonald’s, Pepsi, British Airways, Philip Morris, Proctor & Gamble and Mars.  He has written the book Fat, Forty and Fired.

Srikumar  was an executive at Warner Communications and McGraw-Hill before he created his celebrated MBA course, “Creativity and Personal Mastery.” The course — the only business school course that has its own alumni association — shows students how to discover their unique purpose, creativity and happiness, through group work and a philosophical perspective

Rao is also an adviser to senior business executives, whom he helps find deeper meaning and engagement in their work. He’s the author of Are You Ready to Succeed: Unconventional Strategies for Achieving Personal Mastery in Business and Life

Dr Rao’s work was one of the inspirations of the post Stop Hating your Job.

The video below is only 8 minutes but demonstrates humanity, innovation and leadership.

Enjoy.

The non-profit organization that is Embrace at embraceglobal.org

DONATE HERE

These ideas  sound simple, but  breaking old paradigms is hard work. This is especially true the old habits are linked to  perceived  success. Your current habits got you to here but they will not likely get you to the top.
Over the next 6 weeks I will outline the steps that will assist you in achieving growth in leadership. Maintain a focus on each step  for one week ; it takes time for the concepts to imbed into your unconscious mind. Yes  patience is a virtue.

Step 1 –STOP!

Most senior leaders are on mental auto-pilot. You are fully engaged in managing day-to-day activities;  your mind is constantly running by responding to the stimulus shot at it. In order to remodel your behaviour your first step is to create mental stops.
Many of us understand this concept…count to 10 before you say anything in anger… but rarely do we extend this principle.

Stop is the first step to allow you to build considerations for your behaviours:

• How should I react?
• Why is this how I am thinking?
• Is this truly the only option on this?

But this is getting ahead of the first step – STOP

Break free of the river of thoughts and behaviours;  simply notice your minds ability to pause. This will create awareness in both  the conscious and unconscious mind that you are still in control. As your awareness grows absorb the empty space, the freedom created by your awareness.  This stop is the first step in allowing you to reconnect with yourself and turn off the auto pilot. The key is not to replace your stopped moment with anything simply recongize  you  have the ability to pull out of autopilot.

Try to break free as many times as you can for this week.
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This article is the first of 6 weeks toward improved leadership presence other articles are here.

Below is a recent post written by Tom Peters at www.tompeters.com

The Washington Post reports that Representative Peter Roskam (R-IL), during last week’s hearings, asked automaker CEOs if they’d work for a dollar a year. Chrysler’s Nardelli said yes, GM’s Wagoner said “I don’t have a position on that today,” and Ford’s Alan Mulally, who made $21,700,000 last year, said, “I think I’m okay where I am.”

In the immortal words of Dave Barry, “I’m not making this up.”

Meanwhile CNN’s Kyung Lah reported that the CEO of JAL rides public transit to work, eats in the company cafeteria, and cut his salary below that of his pilots as a personal response to layoffs and forced early retirements that JAL felt necessary to make.

A Financial Times headline on Citicorp reads: “Bank loses over half its value in past three days” “[CEO] Pandit moves to shore up his position as chief.”

As disgusting [DIS-GUST-ING] as Mulally’s “I’m okay” comment was-is, the Pandit headline in its own fashion affected me even more. Citi’s performance is awful—and there’s little or no doubt that Pandit is a major part of the problem. And hence his primary response, following an announced 50,000 plus layoff, is to try and save his own skin? (TP’s considered response: “You miserable, ego-maniacal S.O.B.”)

Have these guys (and they’re almost all guys) no sense of shame? No sense of service? No sense of honor? No sense of sacrifice? No sense of equity?

A little online research Cathy and I did shows that none of the Big Three CEOs had any military service. I do not believe that such service is a generic answer to any particular problem. But I do believe that the uniform absence thereof is perhaps indicative of a lack of a life-as-service, servant leader ethos in general among these three? (The “no military service” piece is almost amusing, in a perverse way, in the case of Nardelli, who is a fanatic believer in some twisted notion of the “military model” of doing business—his willy nilly application of his abominable interpretation of military leadership was one of his many screwups at Home Depot. Part of Nardelli’s, yes, admirable willingness to work for a buck at Chrysler may be the $200 million he took home as a prize for being fired from Home Depot.)

In summary:

Have they no shame?
Have they no sense of service?
Have they no conception of servant leadership?
Have they no soul?
Have they no honor?
Have they no ethos of sacrifice?
Have they no conception of-perception of equity?
(Did any of them go to Sunday School?)

Does it sound like I’m in a pissy mood, maybe still suffering from jetlag following my Middle East trip? Well, I am in a pissy mood, and part of it may indeed be 66-year-old-body-meets-jetlag. But part of it derives directly from Pandit and Mulally and the association of their flavor attitudes to our unfolding economic catastrophe. I’ve spent 40 plus years directly or indirectly on, effectively, one topic: profit through people-centered, people-obsessed leadership. Mulally and Pandit and their not insignificant ilk make me wonder if I pissed away my life in pursuit of an improbable, or even impossible, ideal?

Video

Her book on Lincoln is one of my favourite books on leadership. It is worth a read.

This is a great video on authenticity and driving to what is important

check it out.

Open plan offices have  become all the rage but who are they effective for?

A crowded Starbucks with young business people working on their  laptops.

JK Rowling  wrote  the first Harry Potter in a crowded  coffee shops.

Who could complain about an open plan office with visible example like those sited above. Research suggest employee’s in an open plan office keep longer working hours as compared to others.

At least three factors lead to increased work hours,
✓    Increased visibility of managers and employee’s leads to the pressure to be in the office
✓    Enhances social engagement, leads people to want to stay longer
✓    More distractions during regular business hours, cause people to find productive time outside 9-5.

Dr Carsten Sørensen, London School of Economics, comments: “The move from individual offices to open-plan was a necessary step to enable better communication and through this speed up decisions. It made everyone visible and immediately accessible. It also made it clear to everyone who is at work and who is not. The fact the open-plan offices and long working hours follow each other is a reflection of increased pressure on information workers.”

Neuroscience suggests  the success open plan offices  places  is  dependent on the age  of the employee base.

For employee’s under 35 open plan is fantastic at building teamwork and  creativity with no detriment to concentrated work. The youthful  brain is  incredibly able to narrow the focus and not be distracted by surroundings.

For those of us over 35 this format is distracting, causes poor conceptual performance and severely reduces productivity. The neuroscience is pretty clear, our brain naturally increases it scanning of the environment as  we get older. The 35+ year old brain will distract itself much more easily.

It would appear that older workers tend to  be less productive and need longer working hours in open plan offices to compensate . For younger workers a stronger sense of team and camaraderie  will develop in open plan offices.