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"Disruptive heroes are the people who either completely change the rules or teach us that the status quo needs to be pushed, challenged or broken.
They have a major impact on what we believe is possible, what we do and who we become.
If that sounds daunting for you to take on...don't freak out! You get to pick the scale and scope of your efforts. Focus on something that's mostly within your control and becoming a hero will be easier than you first thought.
But if you would like to change the world as a disruptive hero, could you? Yep. Most of the biggest names in arts, government, business, social movements and more got there by being disruptive. Go for it!"
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"Can we succeed without the body?
On the face of it, this seems like a ridiculous question, but when we step back and take a closer look at modern organizational culture, we might be inclined to wonder. After all, most discussions of management and strategy take place in the disembodied, abstract world of the mind. The body is considered a minor player at best and health becomes a concern only in its absence, when skyrocketing medical costs, absenteeism, and presenteeism reach unacceptable levels.
In practice, today's organization is almost completely blind to the body and its contribution to performance. We are, in the language of therapy, 'vertically disintegrated' or to put it more bluntly, 'dead from the neck down.' As Sir Ken Robinson put it in his legendary TED talk, most of us now consider the body to be little more than 'a locomotor device for the head,' a transport mechanism whose only purpose is to move the brain from one computer terminal or meeting to the next.
And so it comes as no surprise to discover that we are suffering catastrophic consequences."
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"People have come to believe that suffering is now part of working life, and are suffering more than ever. Tough economic times have left fewer people to do the same amount of work. Jobs people used to love have become overwhelming; jobs they never loved have become intolerable. Success seems like an impossible dream as people strive to do more with less. They've seen good people get laid off and good jobs outsourced to cheaper workers. This is madness. It is not an imagination. But there is hope.
In some of the worst circumstances, it is still possible to find people who are performing well and are happy. This article will provide you with some tips for how you too can be a happy, high performer—a high value player."
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"We achieve success by doing what is necessary to get what we want, but often end up in a completely different physical and emotional place than we thought we would be. It's like the pilot who took off at the equator to circumnavigate the globe. Because his course was off by just one degree, by the time he returned to the same longitude, he was lost. An error of only one degree had taken him 500 miles off course, where he ran out of gas and crashed.
No one wants his life to end in a place he didn't intend—a destination of meaningless selfishness, or in a crash caused by regrets. But all too often we don't realize that an error of a few degrees has set us on a course for disaster, and as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, 'We die with our music still in us.'
As I've traveled the world and interviewed the most famous and influential people on the planet, I've discovered that many of their lives have not been as wonderful as perceived. While giving themselves over to fortune and fame, they surrendered their capacity to live as well-adjusted, fulfilled human beings. Yes, I admire the way these individuals have excelled, but I've also seen the costs up close of a single-minded focus on success."
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"The Azelby brothers grew up in Northern New Jersey, just outside New York City, with their eldest sister Terri and a middle brother Tom. Their dad was a New York City police officer and their mother was a substitute teacher at the local catholic grade school. The brothers thoroughly enjoyed their childhood and the many stories they lived or heard from that era shaped their view of the world and inform their business decision making today.
The manifesto they would like to share is a very simple one. If you want to impart a lesson and have it stick in the minds of your audience, it is best to do it within a story ... stories go deep under your skin and penetrate both the conscious and subconscious mind. You will almost always remember a good story and it's quite likely you'll remember the message within it.
We want to share a few memorable stories from our "Growing Up Jersey" collection that we draw upon today to help us lead large complex businesses. If you remember these stories a few days from now or they pop into your mind a few weeks from now then our manifesto may have some validity. If you never remember the stories or recall the underlying messages then we are either really bad writers or our manifesto is complete bunk. We apologize in advance if it's the latter."
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