When people exercise, we talk about endorphins, but endorphins are just short-term. The reason why exercise is valuable is it trains your brain to believe, 'My behavior matters,' which is optimism.
Shawn AchorRead
Positive and engaged brains are a company's greatest assets. More than time and even more than productivity, people must be happy.
Interpretation
A positive work environment enhances employee value and productivity.
Shawn Achor emphasizes that the mental well-being and happiness of employees are more important than traditional metrics like time and productivity. When employees are positive and engaged, their contributions become invaluable assets to the organization, leading to greater success and innovation.
In practice
During a company meeting, use this quote to highlight the importance of employee well-being.
When people exercise, we talk about endorphins, but endorphins are just short-term. The reason why exercise is valuable is it trains your brain to believe, 'My behavior matters,' which is optimism.
Success does not mean happiness. Check out any celebrity magazine to look for examples to disabuse you of thinking that being beautiful, successful or rich will make you happy.
Too many people limit their happiness and success by assuming that taking time off from work will send a negative message to their manager and slow their career advancement.
The research says that being successful doesn't automatically make you happier, but being happier - being more positive - makes you more successful.
Waiting to be happy limits our brain's potential for success, whereas cultivating positive brains makes us more motivated, efficient, resilient, creative, and productive, which drives performance upward.
Constantly scanning the world for the negative comes with a great cost. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals.
If the value of a company doesn't just scream out at you, it's too close.
The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not to just meet them, but to exceed them - preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.
Conscious means "having an awareness of one's inner and outer worlds; mentally perceptive, awake, mindful." So "conscious business" might mean, engaging in an occupation, work, or trade in a mindful, awake fashion. This implies, of course, that many people do not do so. In my experience, that is often the case. So I would definitely be in favor of conscious business; or conscious anything, for that matter.
Of all the things that your company owns, brands are far and away the most important and the toughest. Founders die. Factories burn down. Machinery wears out. Inventories get depleted. Technology becomes obsolete. Brand loyalty is the only sound foundation on which business leaders can build enduring, profitable growth.
Values can set a company apart from the competition by clarifying its identity and serving as a rallying point for employees. But coming up with strong values - and sticking to them - requires real guts.
Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance. That won't change, moreover, because the deck is stacked against investors when it comes to the CEO's pay. The upshot is that a mediocre-or-worse CEO - aided by his handpicked VP of human relations and a consultant from the ever-accommodating firm of Ratchet, Ratchet and Bingo - all too often receives gobs of money from an ill-designed compensation arrangement.
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