Largely by accident, there’s a theme to this week’s three articles. All three are about creativity, and each offers a perspective that some might consider unconventional, at least in the buttoned-up corporate world. For people who work in the creative realm, each of the ideas pushed in these articles will seem familiar.

Masterful inactivity – The Economist

This first piece, entitled “In Praise of Laziness,” describes an approach in which workers are less engaged with meetings and small tasks and instead have big gaps of time to be creative. A study at Harvard Business School reports that workers are more creative on low-pressure days vs. high-pressure days. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? But, at the same time, wouldn’t you think that creativity would also result from a flurry of activity and engagement with coworkers? 

Continue reading →

Do we have a corporate culture at Leggett & Platt? — The Economist

Members of our Creative Services team have fun with a stock photo.

How important is corporate culture? This article discusses a book on the subject, and asks what corporate culture is, exactly. Is it the image that your company projects to the world, or is it the most common habits, like, say, selling things heavily discounted? Or is it simply what this review calls “canteen culture” (for American English, “cafeteria culture”) – the conversations that coworkers have about their company when their boss isn’t listening? What kind of culture do we have at Leggett & Platt? We’re conservative, certainly. Traditional. Can a company as vast as ours have a uniform culture, or do different branches and groups have their own?

Continue reading →

You’re probably guilty of “unconscious bias” at work – The Wall Street Journal

Have you ever taken a fellow employee more seriously because of the school they attended? Or were impressed with the authority and confidence in a coworker’s delivery – and so gave more credence to their ideas? Unconscious bias, defined as “an implicit preference for certain groups,” is considered a growing problem and is being addressed more and more by U.S. corporations. Estimates suggest that nearly 20% of large U.S. employers with diversity programs now provide training for unconscious bias, too. Those companies include Google and BAE, a major defense contractor. The obvious or perhaps most common victims (there are beneficiaries too, of course) of unconscious bias may be women or minority groups, but employment decisions can be affected by any number of things – tall stature vs. short, thin vs. overweight, extrovert vs. introvert, etc. Continue reading →

“Rational” resolutions for 2014 — The Wall Street Journal

It’s not too late for resolutions, is it? This article gets into the science of “optimized decision-making,” helping people set achievable goals and strategies to meet those goals. The category that appealed most to me is “structured procrastination.” I read about this approach years ago, and believe heartily in it. Basically, if you know you’re going to procrastinate on a project, get something unrelated done. Clean the kitchen or get some exercise. It’s a way to stay away from Facebook and cat videos and actually get something accomplished.

Continue reading →

The lost art of conversation – The Atlantic

The use of smartphones and other interactive devices in almost any setting has become pervasive, so articles like this have started becoming pervasive, too. How is the constant use of devices going to affect human interaction? Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and professor at MIT, wrote “Along Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other” in 2011, when smartphone saturation was just emerging. This article features Turkle, who is described as a “tech critic” despite not being “tech-skeptical.” Imagine, if you can, reading about this future phenomena 10 years ago. It would have seemed straight out of a Ray Bradbury novel. Continue reading →

In defense of a messy desk — The Economist

If you keep a cluttered desk, you’ll love this article from The Economist. This piece is near and dear to my heart, but a warning: it’s pretty long. And it was written 11 years ago, so some of the specifics may be dated; after all, a lot of organizational resources – and even the iPhone – weren’t present in 2002. Here is a teaser: “Work by Steve Whittaker and Julia Hirschberg of ATT Labs-Research, however, suggest that clutter may actually be quite an efficient organizing principle…There is a ‘warm’ area, of stuff that needs to be got through in the next few days: it may be there, in part, as a prompt. And there is a ‘cold’ area, at the edges of the desk, of stuff which could just as well be in an archive (or, often, the bin).” Take that, chronic organizers!

Executives learn the basics in social media — Wall Street Journal

CEOs and other high-level executives are paying as much as $60,000 for a two-day course to learn the basics of social media. And you might be surprised how basic these basics are, such as teaching the difference between a Facebook “like” and “share.” The class gets into much more detail and ultimately hits on complex marketing strategies involving social media, but it’s surprising to learn how little some executives know about something that is second nature to workers in their 20s and 30s. And that suggests again how beneficial a “reverse mentoring” program would be for some companies. I linked to an article about the practice in my first blog on November 13.

The 8-hour workday vs. the 90-minute project – LinkedIn

This article on LinkedIn discusses the arbitrary nature of the 8-hour workday. It’s not the result of rigorous scientific analysis, but rather the post-Industrial Revolution desire to add balance to people’s hardworking lives. “Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest,” went the refrain. Continue reading →