In the national bestseller Flow, University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests two key factors determine our overall happiness:

• Our relations with other people
• How we experience our work

You can improve both areas by bringing humor to work each day.

Harvard Business Review (September 2003) reports that executives with a sense of humor climb the corporate ladder more quickly and earn more money than their counterparts.

A good laugh reduces blood pressure, increases heart rate, massages internal organs and reduces the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the blood. It boosts blood flow to your brain, which means you learn more, forget less and feed your curiosity.

While the advantages of a good sense of humor at work are many, there is a dark side that can backfire. How can you be funny without being a jerk?

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• Humor and Managing Change
• Motivation and Morale
• Humor Strengthens Teams
• The Dark Side of Humor
• How to Add Humor at Work

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“In my fifty-two years in business, I’ve never seen an issue galvanize people in a company like sustainability.” Ray Anderson, founder of Interface, Inc.

Sustainability is at the very core of survival. No company or society can last unless it cares for its resources and capital — human, financial and environmental. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Consumers are going green. Their support for sustainable products and practices is growing worldwide. Some companies are wondering if now’s the time to adopt sustainability practices as part of their corporate strategy.

In the most basic terms, greening a business is about doing more with less, which can quickly save you money. Going green also means overcoming several mental hurdles, foremost of which is the expense involved in embracing environmental practices.

It’s a mistake to believe that becoming eco-friendly means unnecessary expenses as we face a global economic slump. Many experts assert that organizations should meet financial challenges by turning sustainability into innovation’s new frontier.

In fact, becoming eco-friendly will soon be a necessary cost of doing business. It’s no longer enough to meet minimum legal compliance for environmental standards. A true competitive advantage lies in influencing economic recovery with forward-thinking sustainability practices.

People at all corporate levels must focus on the following keys:

• Understand what climate change means for business (which is very different from everyone agreeing on the science).
• See the long-term constraints in natural resources and nonrenewable energy.
• View the business in the context of the full value chain, from suppliers to customers and beyond.

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• Corporate Social Responsibility vs. Bottom Line
• Stage 1: Viewing Compliance as Opportunity
• Stage 2: Making Value Chains Sustainable
• Stage 3: Designing Sustainable Products and Services
• Stage 4: Developing New Business Models
• Stage 5: Creating Next-Practice Platforms
• Green Recovery
• Green Engagement
• Green Thinking
• Green Hiring

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“It’s an environment the likes of which managers have never seen—a Great Disruption in which the old rules for success become recipes for failure, and ‘doing more with less’ will not be nearly enough to survive.”—Scott D. Anthony, The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times, Harvard Business Press, 2009

The inevitable constraints this tough economy imposes on companies provide fertile ground for innovation because necessity truly is the mother of invention. Companies that learn to innovate more quickly, cheaply and with less risk will emerge from the downturn stronger than ever.

To succeed, smart executives will need to adopt a different mindset and effective frameworks to determine what to start doing, stop doing and do differently. Consultant and author Scott D. Anthony, who earned his MBA at Harvard Business School, prescribes a disruptive-innovation mindset. His book is well-worth the read for historical perspectives and inspiration.

Over the last decade, technological improvements have made starting and scaling businesses easier than ever. Brazil, Russia, China, India and other emerging markets prove U.S. leaders have more competitors at home and abroad. Industries are frantically converging and colliding.

These changes make it more difficult for great companies to maintain success—a problem that has caused leaders to lose sleep for some time (even before the 2008 financial market collapse).

Tough business environments force companies to take a hard look at innovation. While output may shrink and unemployment is sure to rise, companies that master these challenges have a chance to thrive. Those that don’t are sure to struggle.

A Historical Perspective

While no one can predict with certainty how the global economic crisis will play out, many companies face serious challenges:

• Should they cut costs and streamline innovation projects until business picks up?
• Should they play it safe until the current storm passes?

If history is a guide, the answer is a definitive “no.” We can restore hope and gain a better perspective by taking a step back and considering how past downturns were resolved.

Many successful companies have been launched during recessions. Grim economic times can highlight previously hidden problems or cause old problems to intensify. When a deep-seated customer problem emerges, search for novel ways to address it.

A number of game-changing products, services and business-model innovations were developed or launched in daunting economic climates.

Thirteen of the 25 companies on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as of December 2008, were formed during an economic downturn, including 3M, General Electric, Microsoft and Walt Disney.

Disruptive Innovations

Instead of trying to best their competitors, disruptors change the game. They typically transform existing markets or create new ones by focusing on convenience, simplicity, accessibility or affordability.
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• Disruptive Innovations
• Bad Times, Good Times
• The Transformation Imperative
• Disruptive Guidelines
• The Executive Challenge

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“Human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.” — Malcolm Gladwell

What does it take to transmit bold new ideas to people who don’t want to hear them? How can the language you use facilitate enthusiastic, energetic implementation?

Transformational leaders:

• Generate enduring enthusiasm for a common cause
• Present innovative solutions to solve significant problems
• Catalyze shifts in people’s values and ideologies
• Demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the greater good
• Help others get through crisis moments
• Inspire people to want to change, creating a positive energy that sustains the change
• Generate followers who will ultimately become leaders

The what of transformational leadership is reasonably clear. It’s the how that’s usually obscure.

=>How do leaders communicate complex ideas and spark others into enduringly enthusiastic action?
=>What words do they use to inspire others to become new leaders?
=>Why are some leaders able to accomplish the feat while others fail miserably?

Stephen Denning, a senior scholar at the University of Maryland’s Burns Academy of Leadership, makes the case for transformational communications in his book The Secret Language of Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2007). More than anything, it’s what leaders say — and the way they say it — that generates sustained energy and exponential results.

How to Lead Change

If leaders’ own inner commitment to change is to have any effect at all, they must communicate it to those they aspire to lead. Leaders’ actions speak louder than their words, but in the short run, it’s what leaders say — or don’t say — that has an impact.

The right words can create:

• A galvanizing effect
• Enthusiasm
• Energy
• Momentum
• Sustainable motivation

The wrong words, or even words said in the wrong sequence, can undermine your best intentions and plans, killing an initiative on the spot.

Confirmation Biases

A significant body of research shows that asking people to change often drives them more deeply into opposition. In study after study, people display a phenomenon called confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and to irrationally avoid information and interpretations that contradict existing beliefs.

Successful leaders follow a unique, almost hidden communication pattern:

Grab the audience’s attention ► Stimulate desire ► Reinforce with reasons

Unfortunately, this approach often eludes aspiring leaders. If you want listeners to own the change idea, your stories must help them discover the truth for themselves, thereby creating a new story.

What the leader says is the scaffolding — a catalyst for a creative process inside listeners’ heads.

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• Old-School Communication
• Confirmation Biases
• The Devil in the Details: Words Matter
• 3 Steps for Inspiring Change
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• Step 2: Creating Desire
• Step 3: Reinforcing with Reasons

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Decision making is a critical function in our personal and professional lives. None of us would be in positions of authority without demonstrated abilities to discern issues and make good choices. Our reputations and livelihoods depend on it.

Each day, however, intelligent people make mistakes, with devastating consequences. Why do good leaders make bad decisions? How can we reduce our margin of error?

Our daily decisions are generally small and innocuous. Others are incredibly important, affecting people’s lives and well-being. The daunting reality is that smart people make enormously important decisions with the best information and intentions, and they sometimes go terribly wrong.

Even great leaders make bad decisions:

• President Kennedy is famous for the Bay of Pigs blunder.

• President Hoover failed to inflate the economy after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Authors Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead and Andrew Campbell have studied how smart leaders make catastrophic decisions. In Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It From Happening to You (Harvard Business School Press, 2008), these experts show how the brain’s thinking processes can distort judgment. Think Again identifies four errors of thinking and four safeguards to help us avoid bad decisions.

Neuroscientists and experts in decision making now understand more about how the brain works and how we are prone to several types of faulty thinking when faced with a set of circumstances that require a decision.

The brain uses two processes that enable us to cope with complexities:

• Pattern recognition

• Emotional tagging

Both help us make excellent decisions most of the time. They have survived evolutionary selection precisely because they give us distinct advantages over lesser animals in the food chain.

But in certain conditions, these processes can mislead us, resulting in poor judgments and bad decisions.

Complex decisions always involve personal interpretations and judgment. That’s what makes them difficult to get right. You need debate and consensus — but even with both, two important questions arise:

1. How do you know when you or those debating your premise are coming from a biased position?
2. How do you know when your consensus is nothing more than groupthink?

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Flaws of Decision Making
Old-School Decision Processes
The Brain Science of Decision Making
Pattern-Recognition Flaws
Emotional Tagging
Safeguards
Identify Biases and Implement Safeguards

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The business enterprise has two, and only two, basic functions: marketing
and innovation. It is not necessary for a business to grow bigger; but it is
necessary that it constantly grow better. ―Peter F. Drucker

The organization that fails to continually innovate new products and services
will not survive long. As competition becomes tougher and market challenges
increase, innovation is an imperative for business leaders and managers around the world.

A recent survey by Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. found that 90 percent of executives considered innovation to be crucial to growth and planned to improve innovation performance by an average of 30 percent.

But not all innovations produce commercial success. A new business idea must offer customers exceptional utility at an attractive price, while delivering a tidy profit. The uncertainties inherent to innovation are so great that even the most insightful managers have a hard time evaluating commercial readiness and potential.

Innovation and commercially successful new business ideas emerge partly from inspiration, but mostly from hard work. Managers must establish the right roles and processes, set clear goals, require relevant measures and review progress at every step of the way.

Most business opportunities emanate from methodical analysis of seven areas of opportunity, according to Peter Drucker (Harvard Business Review, 2002). Some exist within the companies or industries themselves:

1. Unexpected occurrences
2. Incongruities
3. Process needs
4. Industry and market changes

Others are based on broader social or demographic trends:

5. Demographic changes
6. Changes in perception
7. New knowledge

Astute managers focus clearly on all seven areas—but even the most seasoned executive may not recognize a good opportunity when it presents itself. What, then, can we learn about sources of innovation from both inside and outside the organization? How do you decide which bright idea to back and identify innovations that will yield commercial success?

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The full 2,000-word article covers the following concepts:

Finding Ideas
7 Sources of Innovation
Outside Sources of Innovation
Changes in Perception
Using New Knowledge
Recognizing a Winning Innovation
Creating Exceptional Utility
When Innovation Leads to Complexity
Resources

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The business enterprise has two, and only two, basic functions: marketing
and innovation. It is not necessary for a business to grow bigger; but it is
necessary that it constantly grow better. – Peter Drucker

An enterprise that does not innovate will not survive long. And management that
does not learn to innovate and foster creativity will not last long.

Business leaders must revamp how they think about innovation. Innovation and
creativity are far less mysterious than previously thought. They are a matter of
taking developed ideas and applying them in new situations.

People will be most creative when they feel motivated by the work itself. When
people are engaged because of their own natural interest and satisfaction in
their work, they will be challenged to be creative through their own intrinsic
motivation.

The paradox of success is that when things are going well there’s no need to
change. Innovation needs to begin before a need is felt.

Cognitive psychologists have shown that the biggest hurdle to solving problems
often isn’t ignorance, it’s access to the right information at the right time.
Information sharing within big organizations is not easy due to geographic
distances, political squabbles, internal competition and bad incentive systems
that hinder the spread of ideas.

Above all, innovation is work rather than genius. It requires knowledge,
ingenuity and focus. Without diligence, persistence and commitment, all the
talent, ingenuity and knowledge are to no avail.

Foremost among life’s teaching is the recognition that humans possess the
capability to deal with complexity and interconnection. Human creativity and
commitment are our greatest resources. -Margaret Wheatley

Important Concepts covered in the full 2,200-word article:

Six managerial Practices that Enhance Creativity
Meaning is the Key to Engaging Creativity
Negativity is the True Enemy of Creativity
Taking the Mystery out of Innovation
Seven Sources of New Ideas
Creating an Idea Factory: Lessons from Edison
Resources on Innovating and Creativity

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