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"In the global race to achieve faster, better, cheaper business greatness, most leaders face a huge gap between the goals they set and the actual results achieved by the people in their organizations. This phenomenon is not a failure to plan, but rather, a failure to execute. [...]
While there are many possible explanations for the root cause of the gap, the one common, recurring element is a stubborn, nagging blind spot: People issues.
They won't go away. They are always around. No matter how much you try to avoid them by setting goals and staying busy, people issues are always right in front of you, either helping or hurting your organization's competitive advantage in the marketplace."
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"Nothing has really changed, even with the popularity of terms like social consumer, sharing consumer etc. people have always shared. Whether sitting around the campfire, standing at the water cooler, or chatting over the garden fence, human beings share their opinions with others. If those opinions prove to be useful, that person will be sought out for an opinion about other things and on a more frequent basis."
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"Many will agree that a system of incentives is, and has been, the backbone of the success of the capitalist economic system. That over centuries, a network of incentives has driven innovation, which in turn has encouraged the inventiveness that has led to the unparalleled generation of ideas, goods, and services across America and the industrialized West.
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Given the evidence and importance of positive incentives, why, over the past 50 years, have policymakers embarked on a systematic and deliberate strategy of putting in place a catalogue of policies that dis-incentivise citizens from acting in a manner that could be beneficial to their economies, and the world at large?"
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"In the good old twentieth century, you could reinvent your company, product category or industry once, and then go for a decade before doing anything especially innovative again. That doesn't work anymore. The world has changed, and more importantly, change itself has changed.
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In the past, stability and change were two contrasting states: when you achieved stability, you did so despite change. Today change itself has become an integral part of stability: today you can achieve stability only by embracing change as a continuous and permanent state.
It used to be, you could find something you do well, learn how to do it, and just keep on doing it. Not anymore.
In the past, reinvention was an option. Today it is an imperative."
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"The goal is to cross your learning edge. [...] To do this you have to let go of the structures, beliefs, and habits that constituted your old sense of self–without losing awareness. It takes a resilient awareness to remain at your learning edge without being overtaken by the inner lizard.
It takes a form of awareness that sustains itself even as the structures of your old self are let go. But, how can you let go of beliefs, attitudes, strategies, and self-images and still be aware? Even more to the point, what is left to be aware when all those mental and emotional supports are withdrawn? To discover this takes a special kind of practice. [...]
The good news is that this specific kind of practice has been developed and refined for thousands of years by researchers and practitioners around the world.
I'm referring to the practice of meditation. Meditation practice develops your inner capacity to remain aware when the conventional supports of position, title, beliefs, attitudes, and self-image are let go. How does meditation do this? By cultivating a specific type of attention known in traditional literature as witness consciousness or the inner observer (in contrast to the inner lizard)."
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