Ethos

These are the themes I have collected that permeate my work and life.

1. Safety doesn’t create innovation. But innovation does create new jobs and new opportunities. Innovation creates new markets and cures for illnesses and ideas that make us excited to get up in the morning. You really want to help the economy? Put yourself out there. Risk everything. Do it for you, your family, your friends. We’ll all thank you.

2. Make the complicated interesting and easy.

3. Persistence, Persuasiveness & Positivity.

4. Services over products. Access over ownership, and services, not stores will dominate the next economy.

5. Experiences over consumption.

6. Work within restrictions. Because passion needs direction. It needs filters, and red tape, and four walls. Passion needs to be challenged to be passion at all.

7. Job-hop for change. Most people look at job-hopping from the perspective of career and salary, but job-hopping is about finding more meaning in work.

8. Ambiguity, Adaptability & Change.

9. Create conflict. To light a fire, you have to have conflict, and to have conflict, you have to have an opinion. Respect other viewpoints enough to challenge them. Respect other ideas enough to disagree.

10. Trust people. Humans are good and improvable. Give individuals the benefit of the doubt.  Respect other people’s time and individuality.

11. We’re all connected. HR people call this transferable skill sets, theorists describe it as systems thinking, and poets recognize these ideas in the words of Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass.

Published 8/1/2010.