VIDEO OF THE MONTH: "Be the Everyday Hero" by John O'Leary
Growing up, John O'Leary suffered a tragic accident that left him with burns on 100% of his body. In this powerful speech, he recounts recovering from such a life-changing experience and the man, the hero, that made it worthwhile.
ARTICLE OF THE MONTH: "Five Management Lessons from the Apollo Moon Landing" by Peter Coy
There is still a lot to learn from NASA's success in sending astronauts to the moon and bringing them back safely 50 years ago.
There’s something faintly embarrassing about the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk . It was just so long ago. It’s no longer “we” who put a man on the moon, it’s “they” who put a man on the moon. So why can’t “we” do it? It’s hard not to feel that for all the technological advances of the last half-century, America has lost something—the ability to unite and overcome long odds to achieve greatness.
At one level this is silly. The U.S. stopped going to the moon because Americans stopped seeing the point of it, not because they stopped being capable of it. The lack of fresh footprints on the lunar surface is not evidence that the U.S. has fallen into a new Dark Age.
Still, the historic Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs do have something to teach us. They were a shining success story of building and managing a complex, decentralized technological enterprise that accomplished an audaciously ambitious goal. In November 1968, seven months before the moon landing, the journal Science wrote that the space program’s “most valuable spin-off of all will be human rather than technological: better knowledge of how to plan, coordinate, and monitor the multitudinous and varied activities of the organizations required to accomplish great social undertakings.”
"Fish: A Proven Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results" by Stephen C. Lundin -Book Reviewed by TLP Cohort #6 Member
“Fish” is a story of a recently widowed woman named Mary-Jane who takes a job as a manager 0n the “3rd floor” of a financial institution, where no one wants to be due to repetitive work, very low morale, and lack of respect by the entire organization. Rather than take another good job offer, she applies the four principles explained in the book, which she observes in action in a vibrant and successful fish market in Seattle.
She befriends the “fishmonger” manager Lonnie, who guides her and her staff in learning how to be happy in their jobs regardless of what they do by improving their attitudes, delegating work and “play” committees and forming a close and productive team that become the envy of the entire company.
The book is a quick read that doesn’t go into too much detail and I would recommend it to others.
"4 Simple Exercises to Strengthen Your Attention and Reduce Distractibility" by Rebekah Barnett
Our attention gets hijacked by everything from the stress in our lives to the ding of our phones. Neuroscientist Amishi Jha shows how we can cultivate the ability to focus on what really matters.
“I think, therefore I am distracted.”
If Descartes were writing today, this is what his famous aphorism might have become. We’re living in an age of distraction, battered by our own customized waterfall of notifications, alerts, texts, videos, binge-able TV, and more. It’s not surprising our minds often feel like a jumble.
But it turns out we’re not at the mercy of our runaway minds. Amishi Jha, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami and the director of contemplative neuroscience for the UMindfulness Initiative, studies the brain’s attention mechanisms, and she’s found there are specific exercises we can do to strengthen our ability to pay attention. Here, she explains how you can get your wandering mind back under control.
