The Power of Neuroscience 

Our thoughts and mental patterns have a profound impact on our physical health. This connection between mind and body is not just philosophical—it is backed by emerging neuroscience. In this post, I’ll share a personal story about how I discovered, quite by accident, that an outdated mental model drove my long-standing aversion to physical exercise. With a simple shift in how my brain predicted physical exertion, I was able to completely transform my ability to exercise without wishing I were dead. This is the power of neuroplasticity—the brain's ability to change and adapt in response to new experiences.

My Personal Experience

For as long as I can remember, every time I engaged in hard physical exertion, I experienced severe nausea. Growing up, I never played sports, I was active, but rarely found my limits, so this wasn’t something I encountered often. The first time it became a real issue was after I graduated from high school and went to basic training. We ran every day—something I’d never done before. After every run, I felt absolutely awful. No runner's high for me; instead, running and other intense exercises were torturous, and this pattern persisted throughout my adult life.

In January 2022, I began working with a personal trainer. Again, during every workout, the nausea would return, forcing me to stop and recover. Before one particular session, I remembered that ginger, when held between the cheek and gum, could help prevent nausea. I had some ginger candy in my pantry and decided to try it. To my surprise, it was like magic—no nausea! Then, a few weeks later, I forgot to take the ginger before a workout and didn’t even notice the absence of nausea until I was walking home. For the first time in my life, I had completed a workout without feeling sick! 

At that point, I was doing yoga three times a week and walking five miles daily, so I was in decent shape. Still, I found myself drawn to the empirical evidence suggesting that resistance training was the most important form of exercise for health and longevity, particularly as we age (Doidge, 2007). But I had always struggled to maintain an exercise routine because of how it made me feel. So, why had the nausea suddenly stopped? Was it random, or had something fundamentally changed?

I don’t believe my physiology simply shifted overnight. Instead, I suspect that sometime before I turned 18, I developed a faulty mental model that caused my brain to associate intense physical exertion with nausea. This mental model was likely reinforced every time I exercised. But when I used ginger to interrupt the nausea, I believe I inadvertently interrupted that model and allowed my brain to form a new more beneficial model. 

The Neuroscience Behind It

In 2022, I came across How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett. Barrett’s research shows that our brains are predictive rather than reactive, constantly generating predictions based on past experiences to prepare us for future events (Barrett, 2017). According to her theory of constructed emotion, emotions are not hardwired responses, but rather constructed experiences based on the brain’s predictions. This aligns with the idea that my nausea during exercise wasn’t a direct reaction to the exertion itself, but rather a prediction my brain had been making for decades. When I used ginger to interrupt this response, I believe I began to "teach" my brain a new prediction model—one that no longer associated physical exertion with nausea.

Ginger and Nausea: A Practical Solution

The use of ginger to combat nausea is backed by science. Ginger contains compounds such as gingerol and shogaol, which have anti-inflammatory and antiemetic properties. Research supports its efficacy in preventing nausea in various contexts, including motion sickness and postoperative recovery (Lien et al., 2003). When I began using ginger before workouts, I effectively interrupted the brain’s conditioned response to physical exertion. This allowed me to dissociate exercise from the nausea response, resetting the faulty mental model that had plagued me for decades.

Interestingly, I had learned about ginger's anti-nausea properties back in 2005 when I practiced Native American spirituality with Lakota Indians in San Diego. During our sweat lodge ceremonies, where the heat and steam could become overwhelming, the lodge leader would hand out ginger to those feeling sick. Despite knowing about ginger’s effectiveness, it took me 16 years to make the connection and apply that knowledge to my exercise-induced nausea. Functional fixedness in action.

Now, I live in Da Nang, Vietnam, where I work with a personal trainer three times a week, walk five miles a day, and, as of last week, I’ve started running. For the first time in my adult life, I ran for 20 minutes without feeling sick—and I was ecstatic! I can run, and it's now a regular part of my routine.

Rethinking Our Mental Models

This experience made me realize how deeply ingrained mental models can affect our behavior and physical responses. Our brains create mental models—also known as cognitive schemas—that predict what will happen based on past experiences. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a well-established approach in psychology that helps individuals identify and modify harmful or limiting thought patterns. CBT operates on the premise that by changing these cognitive schemas, we can alter our emotional and physiological responses (Beck, 1979). It was created long before Barrett's research and doesn't take advantage of the predictive nature of our brains, but it's in the right neighborhood, as are its more modern counterparts. 

In my case, the nausea I experienced during exercise was likely due to a cognitive schema that my brain had developed long ago, associating exertion with discomfort. By interrupting this model with the use of ginger, I essentially rewired my brain to expect a different outcome from physical exertion—a process known as cognitive restructuring.

The Future of AI and Wearable Technology

This leads me to wonder about the potential for technology to help us identify and correct faulty mental models more systematically. Cognitive therapies like CBT provide us with the tools to recognize and replace unhelpful thought patterns, but what if we could take this a step further? Imagine a future where wearable technology and AI could monitor our physiological and psychological responses in real-time, predicting when a mental model might be working against us and offering suggestions for improvement.

Already, companies like Apple, Google, and startups like WHOOP are developing wearable devices that track health data and provide personalized insights (Topol, 2019). AI-driven predictive models are being explored for their ability to detect early signs of chronic diseases by analyzing continuous data from wearables (Esteva et al., 2019). It’s only a matter of time before such technologies allow us to identify faulty mental models and replace them proactively. This could represent the next step in preventive medicine, where AI can monitor and optimize our mental and physical health.

While this level of monitoring may feel invasive to some, I predict future generations will more readily accept and adapt to it, recognizing its potential to improve both mental and physical well-being.

References

• Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

• Beck, A. T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. Penguin.

• Clark, A. (2013). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press.

• Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Penguin.

• Esteva, A., Robicquet, A., Ramsundar, B., Kuleshov, V., DePristo, M., Chou, K., Cui, C., Corrado, G. S., Thrun, S., & Dean, J. (2019). A guide to deep learning in healthcare. Nature Medicine, 25(1), 24–29. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0316-z

• Lien, H.C., Sun, W.M., Chen, Y.H., Kim, H., Hasler, W., Owyang, C. (2003). Effects of ginger on motion sickness and gastric slow-wave dysrhythmias induced by circular vection. American Journal of Physiology-Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, 284(3), G481-G489. https://doi.org/10.1152/ajpgi.00187.2002

• Topol, E. J. (2019). Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. Basic Books.

There are a number of ways to quickly develop rapport with folks at work, whether they’re clients or internal partners. In this post I’m going to write from the perspective of Behavioral Economics and Positive Psychology and focus on deepening client relationships. This is a long-term strategy. It’s about becoming a trusted advisor, not making a quick buck. You may not make a dollar today, but you’ll make many more dollars tomorrow by following these ideas. 

This post is about my personal preference to build rapport with clients by always doing the right thing for them or as the Atlassian team says, “Don’t fuck the customer.” Behavioral Economics is focused on influence, not taking the client’s perspective. And this is how I quickly gain trust with other people so I can become a trusted advisor, develop social capital and be more effective at work. The goal of Positive Psychology is to have optimal mental health.

Behavioral Economics says we have two types of relationships, transactional and social. Transactional relationships are win/lose, social relationships are win/win. In business, we start out in a transactional relationship and where we want to be is in a social relationship. In my experience, the best way to make the transition from transactional to social is by showing in words and deeds that I care more about doing the right thing for the folks I’m working with than I do about selling them anything. 

There is a caveat, you have to genuinely care more about meeting the other person’s needs than you do about selling, you have to put the client before your company. The idea is to build a solid foundation for a relationship by demonstrating caring in words and deeds, but you can’t pretend to care, you have to genuinely care. Faking authenticity is very difficult and if the other person feels you aren’t being genuine, things will likely go badly. 

Be intentional, intent is powerful. When I work with a client, I let them know that my intent is to make them more successful at their jobs, because that’s the role I’m in. I do that by showing them best practices and always doing what’s in their best interest, even if it conflicts with my self-interest, at least in the short term. In the long term, both parties are likely to be more successful.

Be confident. No one is going to see you as a trusted advisor if you don’t believe you’re a subject matter expert. The quickest way to gain confidence is to act as you have it. Fake it until you make it is a proven technique in Positive Psychology to build confidence. However, faking it isn’t enough. You have to put in focused effort to become a subject matter expert. Before your meeting ensure that you feel confident with your understanding of the subject matter by doing some research and at least gaining a high-level overview. Take notes and record the call if possible. Then use the recording as a feedback loop.  Listen to calls and try to find ways to improve. 

If you discover a solution to a client’s problem that doesn’t help you or your company, say it’s recommending a competitor or an off the shelf software package and you share that info with the client, it’s a demonstration of your caring for them. Most people won’t step out of their comfort zone to do this. It’s a risky strategy to those who haven’t worked this way. It’s most effective to use this strategy early in the relationship, but it will help you build trust across the life of your relationships.

Social relationships mean both people are invested in each other’s needs, that fairness is at the center of the relationship and over time you can build up social capital. That is you can build up goodwill with your clients and create social obligations. In social relationships, we naturally seek out win/win solutions. And we aren’t perfect, social capital creates a social burden and can be used to help others overlook mistakes we make and it allows us to make asks that are more likely to get a yes. 

How do we to make the transition from transactional to social relationships? You have to change the way you think of your clients, to think about them more as friends who you want to help rather than businesses you want to profit from. Changing the way we think about things is a challenge for most of us, it takes practice and focused effort. It’s simple but requires dedication, time and practice. One tool we can use comes from Positive Psychology and is called reframing. The idea is to pay attention to our thoughts and alter them just a bit and over time, that change in thought will become our new reality. Then we repeat this process until we have adapted the desired perspective. 

Let’s say I want to change my behavior around asking other people for help. I’d start by paying attention to the chatter in my head around asking for help. I might start out with the message, “I’m a strong independent person who doesn’t need help, I don’t want to take the chance of being let down.” Let’s say my goal is to change my perspective to, “If I don’t ask other people for help, then I’m robbing them of that good feeling I get when I help other people.” I start with a small change, “I’m a strong independent person who doesn’t need help and I get that I’m being selfish for not asking for help, so I’ll ask for help with things I could do myself, so if people let me down, it won’t hurt as much.” As I put my thoughts into action and I take chances and ask for help, I keep iterating on this until I adopt my goal perspective. So far we’ve talking about internal changes we can make and actions we can take to build closer relationships. These ideas will work in most any context, work, family, friends, as long as you genuinely care for the other person and ensure your words and deeds match up. 

We want to be in social relationships with our clients and build up social capital because it gives us influence. Influence is the beneficial side of manipulation. Manipulation has negative connotations because it’s often used for the benefit of the manipulator and to the detriment of the manipulated. With influence, we try to change the behavior of others for their benefit. Once again, we are taking actions that benefit the person we are in a social relationship with. If you try to manipulate someone against their best interests it will likely come back to you in a way you don’t like.

People value things they create more than things they buy, this is the Ikea effect. We know from research that even if all you do is assemble something, you will assign it a higher monetary value. Partner with your clients and have them participate as much as you can. You want them to feel like they have ownership in the thing you are collaborating on because they’ll value it more. That’s why if I offer to edit a client’s writing, I call it optimizing, not fixing, editing or whatnot. I don’t want to imply that there’s anything wrong with what they did, just that I want to make it optimal. 

You want to make it easy for the other person to think nice things of you. Every time someone gives you an enthusiastic YES, their brain releases dopamine and after about 5-7 yeses they start feeling closer to you, and they start to trust you. A yes is a metaphor for any sort of positive interaction. The idea is to provide massive value before asking for anything that might benefit you. This is a social capital shortcut. Your goal should be to make the time you spend with your clients, the most valuable time in their day. Make your time with your clients about them, not you. 

Avoid choice overload or the Home Depot effect. It’s better to give clients a few good choices than 100 choices. You want to reduce the friction they have between wanting to do something and doing it. If a client is having a hard time deciding on something, see if you can schedule a call to help them narrow down their choices and help them move forward.

People tend to default to the first options presented to them. Opt in/out is a good example. Most people will leave the default on an email list signup, whether it’s opt in or opt out. Present your desired perfect state first, then other options if it’s a good idea. Just keep the number of options low. 

Scarcity is a powerful motivator, the less there is of something the strong the desire for it is. False scarcity is a common tactic used by marketers everywhere but nowhere more than on the internet. Even when you know how it works, it still pulls you in to buy. Just last weekend I went to book a hotel room and one that looked nice only had one room left, so I booked. Then I found out it was a room in a shared condo with a shared bath. No thanks. I was able to cancel it and then did a better job of looking at my options. False scarcity is manipulative, things like count down timers, limited offers, and deal expiration all create scarcity.

Lastly let’s talk about framing or priming. You can make people more receptive by putting them in a more beneficial mental state. You don’t know what kind of day the other person is having and if you can do something to brighten up their day at the start of a meeting, it can influence the outcome of the meeting. Getting them to think a happy thought can cancel out the soul-crushing commute they had today. Your goal is to get your client to think about something that makes them happy, it could be their children, a recent trip, a hobby they love, etc. Even showing a picture of a cute animal can put someone in their happy place. I do research on clients before a call, I look for anything that we have in common or anything positive I can bring up about them or their company.  Our brains focus more on how things start and end than what happens in the middle. Start and end meetings on a high note, starting on a high note sets the tone for the meeting, ending on a high note, gives people a lasting positive impression. 

We’ve talked about a broad set of topics and if one or two of them ring true to you, then start using them to get better results. As a side benefit, you’ll likely feel better about yourself by working this way. Knowing how and why we do what we do helps us to be better people, to have better relationships and to have a more satisfying life. 

An organization’s vision, mission, and values are the roots of its culture, and creating them is a completely different topic. This post assumes you have these things already and did a good job creating them. A good way for you to know if you did a good job with them is to ask a bunch of random team members what they are and what they mean. In the vast majority of organizations, a mission statement is largely window dressing. A marketing exercise completed and forgotten except on some walls and marketing materials. If this is you, then your culture is already in trouble. And lastly, before we move on from this related topic, a vision creates an asymptote, something you can approach and get close to by never meets. A mission points the organization in a direction and the values tell you how to get there.

This is important for culture because if your vision, mission, and values are a great fit for your organization, then a core part of your culture will be to follow them.

Before we go any deeper, let’s define what sustainable culture is. It’s durable, long-lasting, adaptable, inclusive and it’s the guiding force for creating trust and transparency in our organizations. It’s something we live in our work lives, not a marketing exercise. A sustainable culture serves its organization, customers, and partners. It helps to define the organization and should be easily propagated. Zappos culture book is an excellent example of an artifact that supports a sustainable culture.

Branham and Hirshfield’s book, Re-Engage is basically a set of case studies for how to define your culture, it’s essential reading to help you define your culture. In fact, there are a few areas of research that will be key to creating a sustainable culture. Positive Psychology teaches us to have optimal lives, how to be resilient, and how to be grateful and feel like we are enough. It teaches us how to motivate ourselves and how not to have a negative impact on other people’s motivation. This field also tells us how to attain Flow States which increase our well-being and the quality of our work. Behavioral Economics is the science behind marketing, it’s the study of why people do what they do and shows that while we are predictable, we are also very irrational. Most of why we do what we do needs to be researched to be understood because it’s so counterintuitive. For instance, in studies done around the world, when you offer someone a reward to do a creative task and measure things like time to completion of a creative task, the person being rewarded is always slower to complete the task. Cognitive Neuroscience is the study of how our physical brains work in conjunction with our cognition. We learn how memory and recall work, that our brains are essentially serial processors. We can only hold a small number of things in our minds at a time, which means we are bad at multitasking. Systems Thinking is also a key topic. It shows us how to create feedback loops to see how things are obscured by time. If you have long-term goals that span 20, 30...100 years, this will be very important. Human beings are very complex, and our problems generally require complex solutions. Browse my reading list for related books. It would be a great idea to get a grounding in these areas before trying to create a sustainable company culture. Like with most things, the more work you do upfront, the more it will pay off. Go slow now to go fast later.

If you are a bit overwhelmed by fulfilling these prerequisites, that’s normal. This is a huge undertaking that requires massive work and dedication. If the idea of this excites you, as it does me, it’s a good indicator that this sort of work is a good fit for you. Getting a grounding in these areas can take a year (if you work on nothing else and learn very quickly), to 3 or 4 years. 2 years is a good timeline to shoot for if you can be dedicated. To speed things up, work with your team, commit to being a SME in an area, and share your knowledge. If you don’t do the prework, you’ll make a lot more mistakes, take wrong turns, and find dead ends. You’ll also much more likely to fail or get crappy results.

I’ve been studying these topics since 2010 when I launched my blog. I’m obsessed with creating generational companies. Companies that last at least 50-100+ years because big hairy problems take generations to solve.

What next? Use your learning in intrinsic motivation to help your team inspire itself to take on the task of defining your culture. The more the team is involved, the more they will buy into the results, the better the results will be. Keep in mind the things you’ve learned while you are defining your culture to keep the team engaged and put in feedback loops to help you know when things are going off track so they can be addressed.

The vast majority of company cultures are random and not well thought out, many that are thought out are not based on good science, either way, the results aren’t great and usually not very sustainable. That’s because doing this well is hard work and most companies want a quick fix. Even the ones with great intentions can easily go off track if they don’t understand the science.

If you thought you were going to get a quick answer, sorry about that. That would be like looking up how to do a laparoscopic appendectomy, having not been to med school and expecting you could hit the medical supply store, read up and do a quick operation over the weekend. Humans are very complex, the more of us that interact, the more complex things get.

Now get out there and change the world!

From a team perspective, the primary service we can perform as leaders is to enable the success of our teams, to be servant leaders. To do that, we have to know what success looks like, ensure that the team has the tools and knowledge they need, that they are developing mastery and growing, and that we have created an environment conducive for them to motivate themselves.

There is a lot to unpack here!

Knowing what success looks like starts with our mission and vision, then working with each team member to negotiate their goals to support the mission. Once we do that, we can work with them to create measures. The goals should be stretch goals. They should cause the team to learn new skills or expand existing skills. Having a learning organization is central to keeping up with our ever-changing world. It’s also essential to consider the area(s) of mastery team members are developing so their goals align.

Now that we have a direction and goals, we can do a gap analysis to ensure that team members have the tools and mentoring they need and a learning plan. We are setting them up for success and fulfillment. Measures of success should be reviewed regularly. This may vary due to the complexity of the task or the goal date. A weekly check-in is a good idea. If we had waited to look at measures until near the end of the project, it could have veered off track. It’s also important to take an agile approach and adjust or even eliminate tasks as business needs change. If you have to change direction or end a task, make it a collaborative decision. Don’t make a pronouncement. More on that shortly.

Team members’ mastery is essential for an organization to stay relevant. The rate of change in society and technology is ever-increasing. If we think of an organization as an organism, we can’t just have some portion of the organization growing and learning. The whole team needs to participate. The whole organism needs to evolve. Not just the head or the feet.

Underpinning all of this creates an environment conducive for the team to motivate themselves. Extrinsic motivation, command, and control, or carrots and sticks, is an outdated and harmful practice for team members who do creative work. In the knowledge economy, that should be all of us. This leads us to intrinsic motivation, the engine of personal purpose and self-motivation, our “why.” Dan Pink, in his book Drive, says the team needs Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose for us to motivate ourselves. We need autonomy about the work we do, when we do it, and who we do it with, we need to be constantly challenged and growing toward a deeper mastery, and we need to be part of something bigger than ourselves. These things are necessary and not sufficient.
All of this is important because if our team does not feel safe, valued, and relevant, if they don’t trust their leaders or each other, their fight or flight reaction will be triggered, and their ability for creative thinking will be impaired. Any time this happens, it takes a lot of effort to build trust and feel safe again. Because of how our brains work, it’s much easier to make us feel unsafe or threatened than to do the opposite. This is one reason why trust and transparency are so important. We are less resistant when we feel safe, trust our leaders, and are involved in change. And we want our teams to embrace change, not actively resist it.

This is why servant leadership is so important. Leaders must build relationships with their direct reports, trust, and demonstrate care. They have to be dedicated to the well-being and success of each team member.

Being a servant leader is more like being a coach than a boss. And a well-cared-for team will walk over hot coals for such a leader!. Some of you are probably thinking, what about the shit work? That’s easy. We all do it, each of us takes a turn. We do it for the good of the team. When I was in IT leadership roles and a truck pulled up with equipment, I was the first one out the door to help unload, and with a smile on my face and a spring in my step.

Building these relationships with the team, understanding their passions, what motivates, them how they like to be recognized, and what they are good at is hard work, helping them create goals and measures is harder still. At our core, we all want to be of service, and this is the way leaders can be of the highest level of service. It’s the most important work we can do.

Finding a remote job is hard work. In the last couple of years, remote work has caught on, and the supply of remote jobs has not kept up with demand. That means that many more people are looking for remote work than there are available jobs. The competition for remote positions is fierce! I think the main reason for this is that most companies are not “remote ready.” For remote companies to be successful, they have to operate by different rules than brick and mortar companies, but I discussed that in a previous post. It would be an excellent idea to go and read that post now and then come back to read this one. It will give you a broad sense of culture at a remote company.

If you have worked remotely, worked for a startup, or owned your own business, then you likely have the skills to work remotely. Unlike a traditional job, where you show up at time X and leave at time Y, and put in your 40 hours, most remote workers set their own hours, decide where they will work from, and have to be self-motivated to get things done.

The research on remote work is clear. Remote workers get more done in less time. When working in an office with your team, you have little control over your time and distractions. The focus tends to be on how many hours you work, not what you achieve, and you waste time commuting.

Let’s look at the skills most remote workers need:

• Self-discipline

• Time management

• Stellar written and verbal communication skills

Competence with communication, collaboration, project management, CRM, and other common apps used by remote teams

Ways of thinking or mindset:

• The ability to develop a deep trust in your team members and managers

• The ability to be completely transparent

• Have a bias toward action

• The ability to focus on results

Remote work is not for everyone. Some folks have a hard time being alone all day. Some can’t focus on work when they are at home. They get distracted by kids, pets, or chores. Some people have difficulty engaging in work unless someone is cracking the whip. I like to work from my home office. Other folks like to work from coffee shops or co-working spaces. These more public locations can help with loneliness or whatnot.

If you have the skills and mindset mentioned above, you're ready to look for remote work!  If not, you need to acquire those skills and that mindset if you want the best chance to succeed. Look for a future post where I’ll address this.

Like anything important, the work we do to prepare is often the most important. Thorough preparation makes for easier execution. I always advise folks looking for work to create a success inventory if they don’t have one. Here is a sample success inventory. It lists all the successes you have had related to work. It’s best to focus on times you made money, saved money, increased efficiency, or decreased expenses in your work. No matter what a company tells you they care about, what they care about is making and saving money. Now that you have your success inventory, you will use it to write resumes and cover letters and prepare for interviews. Start by picking the niche you will apply for. It’s best to choose a single focus for the job you want. For me, it was Project Manager. Then create a resume that focuses on showing your achievements in your niche and your remote work skills/mindset. Use your success list as proof you can do the job.

Next, optimize your LinkedIn profile to match your resume and highlight your niche and remote work experience. The skills and mindset I talked about need to be highlighted for remote work, and they are transferable, so even if you’ve never done remote work, these skills will make you remote work ready.

Now you know what jobs you want to apply for, and you have what you need to start applying. Now it’s simply a matter of persistence and networking. You can use this document to find remote job boards and remote companies. Apply for every job you are well qualified for.

Join all the freelancer sites, like Upwork, that you can.  This is a great way to get experience with remote work. If you are a native English speaker with a 4-year degree, consider getting a TEFL certificate and a job online teaching English. The pay is ok, up to $20 an hour, and it’s another good way to get remote experience.

Beware of scams. If anyone ever asks you to pay them to give you work, it is very likely a scam. If your job includes recruiting new team members and you get a cut of what they sell, it’s very likely a scam. If a company wants login info to your bank account, it’s a scam. If it’s too good to be true, it’s a scam.

If you want your remote company to be successful, you’ll need a culture centered on results, trust, and transparency. You can run a brick-and-mortar company in the old way, it will be at a competitive disadvantage, but you could do it. If you try using traditional management practices with a remote company, it will likely fail.

Until very recently, there has been little to no management innovation since the 1800’s when the British East India Company created the first management practices. They used command and control or carrots and sticks, otherwise known as extrinsic motivation to run their companies and over 85% of companies are still run this way.

Fully remote companies run best when they are run asynchronously when it doesn’t matter where you are or when you work. Requiring folks to work core hours, be in certain time zones or whatnot is a competitive disadvantage. Technology has advanced to the point where as long as you have a decent internet connection, 20 megabytes or greater in most cases, you can work from anywhere in the world.  Zapier.com is a great example, they have 350 team members all working asynchronously.

There is no set formula for creating your company culture, and the culture is what makes the company special or unique. Zappos.com is hyper-focused on customer service. Gore.com is privately held and run democratically. Atllassian.com has values like, “Don’t fuck the customer” and has no sales team.  There are things that should be incorporated into all remote companies.

• Results Focused: It’s about getting results, not how much you work. You negotiate your goals with your manager/team and when they are done, you are done. The reward for a job well done is not more work!

• Trust: Hire good people, work with them to ensure they don’t have skills gaps, and create an environment that will help them to motivate themselves and foster their success.

• Transparency: Share everything, good news, bad news, financials including salary, and all communication with perhaps a few small exceptions. Be an outstanding communicator.

Traditional management empowers a handful of people at the top to do all the thinking for a company and forces everyone else to conform to their will, do it their way, in their time and a place they prescribe. Human beings resent being manipulated and when someone offers you a reward or punishment, they are manipulating you. If you do this, I’ll give you that. When we feel threatened, less than, left out, looked over, unappreciated or whatnot, it causes a fight or flight reaction in our brain, our amygdala secretes adrenaline, and blood is rerouted from our frontal cortex to our hindbrain. This is a major cause for folks being disengaged at work and disengagement for remote companies is death. It creates a vicious cycle.

Traditional managers give orders, they tell their employees what to do, how to do it, where they should do it and when they have to do it. The thought of working like that again makes me ill! It takes little to no training to be a traditional manager, it’s mostly administrative training.

It’s best for remote companies to follow a servant/leader model. Servant/leaders are facilitators of the team’s success, they are coaches, not authoritarians. Leading this way takes coaching and training. It means learning about each person on your team, how they work best, what motivates and demotivates them, how they like to be recognized and rewarded, and most of all it means caring deeply for the folks that work for you.

Traditional managers focus on you having your ass in a seat for 8 or 10 hours a day. There is always that one person in the office, who is the first to arrive, the last to leave, and seems to be constantly busy. In my experience, when a company makes the shift to results-based management, these are the folks that can’t adapt. They seem busy but are not achieving results, they seem engaged but are just spinning their wheels.

If you use modern management practices like the servant/leader model, you can more easily focus on results. Working this way is much more flexible, more agile. It builds better relationships on the team and it lets us get a lot more done.

When trust is the default mode when we treat team members as adults, not people we need to control or keep under our thumb, it creates a virtuous cycle, it’s uplifting. And it makes it easier to face and admit to failure. According to research in behavioral economics, we have two kinds of relationships, social relationships, and transactional relationships. The former is built on trust and in that mode, we seek win/win outcomes. The latter is built on selfishness and results in win/lose outcomes. I’ll take win/win outcomes every time!

Transparency can’t really happen without trust. Many remote companies publish salaries or have transparent pay scales so everyone knows what everyone else makes.  When they have a problem, instead of 3 guys in a room trying to figure out what to do, they pose the problem to the entire team to seek a solution. No one likes to find out later about a bad surprise! Would you rather trust a few people at the top to solve problems, look for opportunities, and give feedback or would you rather use the combined brainpower of the entire team?  I’ll take the many over the few, every time!

In summary, if you want your remote company to be successful, focus on results, trust, and transparency. Look to your team to define your culture and figure out what makes you unique and play to your strengths. Train and coach your managers to be servant/leaders and you’ll have the best chance of creating a sustainable remote business.

People are always asking about how to find remote work and what does it take to live abroad? There are tons of online resources, which I’ll list in the blog post.

Why work remotely?

• Location independence

• Set your own hours

• Work from where works best for you

  • Home

  • Coffee Shop

  • Co-working space

• The ability to be more flexible with salary

• Easier to travel

• Work without distraction

To succeed in working remotely, you have to have discipline. You know what I'm talking about if you have successfully run your own business. This is why working remotely is not a good fit for some folks. They get distracted or just don’t have the intrinsic motivation to push themselves.

You’ll need a good internet connection, which limits where in the world you can live. You need to know what hours you can work. If you live in Mexico, having a remote job in China may mean getting up at 4 am. You’ll need to be a great communicator, written and verbal. And, of course, you have to have to be competent with technology.

Where to look for remote work?

Your favorite online jobs platform has them, LinkedIn, etc. But this is the best source I know of for where to look for online work. It’s a google doc maintained by its users. In addition, look for Facebook groups in Digital Nomad Hubs, like Medellin and Chiang Mai, or your desired destination.

Your reasons for wanting remote work might be different than mine. I almost always choose to live someplace with a low cost of living. Doing so gives me more freedom to take a wider variety of jobs, and I have a long history of going from being the low man on the totem pole to being the guy running things. But that is not my only criterion. A new home has to have good internet, at least 15 megs, have a great quality of life, friendly people and preferably be near the beach. This year, I live 200 meters from the Pacific Ocean in Puerto Vallarta, MX. Six months before I got here, I was in Medellin, CO.

If you are a native English speaker with a 2 or 4 year degree, the easiest and best-paying job to get started is teaching English to Chinese kids online. It pays around $20 an hour and would be a great way to move to Asia. Countries like Vietnam and Cambodia have very liberal visa policies, good quality of life, and a very low cost of living. The other option is to go to Korea or China and get a full-time job teaching English. These two countries pay about the best and have the best benefits. I did this in Thailand, and it was a great experience. But I’d not recommend teaching in Thailand. Their education system is horrible, and the pay is meh. If you want a job like this, you’ll need to be a native English speaker, have a 4-year degree, and have a TEFL certificate.

Money

I don’t have any debts. If you are going to move overseas, in most cases, you’ll want some savings to fall back on. For me, that’s about $15,000. I use Mint to manage my finances because I want know where I am at any time. Depending on your job situation, you won’t need that much money. For instance, some schools in Asia will send you a plane ticket and give you one to get home, and in the countries I mentioned, if you live frugally, you can save $1000 a month. But If you plan to move somewhere and then look for work or just start teaching English online, you’re going to want some savings to fall back on.

I figure out my savings goals and my monthly living expenses and use that as the lowest salary I can take. I can’t take a job if it doesn’t pay the minimum.

Sure, most Americans seem to live paycheck to paycheck. But that could be a disaster overseas. When I was teaching in Bangkok, nearly all the guys I worked with were living paycheck to paycheck. What happens if they get fired? If you lose your job in Thailand, you lose your visa and have about ten days to leave the country. Not good if you don’t have savings to fall back on.

A friend forwarded me a link to a pitch session yesterday morning, and as I’m in networking mode, trying to find an amazing job, I signed up and attended. I didn’t know much about the event before I arrived and the first thing that struck me was that all of the folks pitching had startups that did good things, that aimed to make the world a better place by increasing what Project Heha calls “Super Happiness.”

I’ve been to quite a few pitch sessions, and this was by far the most inspirational pitch session I’ve ever been to. I was brought to the point of tears many times over the course of the afternoon. To see so many people trying to do good in the world in one place was humbling and quite inspirational. 

The Super Happiness Challenge was an international competition that started accepting applications in May 2017.  There were two tracks, an Idea Track, and a Startup track.  Five finalists came from as far away as Iceland and Africa to pitch. The event was hosted by GSV Labs, great people with an amazing space.

From my perspective, the winners in both categories were obvious choices, and the judges had difficulty deciding, especially between the grand prize and runner-up prizes.

All one needed to enter the idea track: “The idea track is open to individuals who have an innovative, creative solution that promotes happiness.” Most of the idea track entries were pretty far along. Many had apps or significant achievements. The winner, Smart Garbage Medical Insurance, created a micro-insurance system where slum residents in Tanzania collect plastic refuse, which widely pollutes the slum, it’s collected monthly, and turned into plastic timber, which is sold to make things like decks and fences. The proceeds go to buying insurance. So far, they have insured 75 families!  It’s a triple win, people most at risk get insurance, the environment is improved, and a new building material that is much more resilient than wood is created. What an innovation! 

To enter the startup track, one needed to, have a startup along the same lines. All of the startup entries were impressive, not just from their ability to do good but also from their viability. The winner, WeFarm.org, blew the top of my head off!  They have created the world’s largest farmer to farmer digital network.  They have over 420,000 farmers connected in Kenya, all via SMS.  Farmers are rated, and AI is used to connect folks who have questions to those who can answer them. We are talking about folks who have, until now, no access to the internet and no way to communicate outside their personal networks. WeFarm is also using this service to sell supplies like seeds and insurance and plans on a peer to peer market soon.

For those of you who don't understand how big a deal this is, 80% of the folks in Africa have cell phones, and only 30% of the population has internet. Similar numbers exist for other developing regions. This demographic represents the biggest opportunity for service providers, eCommerce, and social media worldwide. It’s a nearly untapped market, and luckily the brilliant folks at WeFarm are using their foresight for good.

I’d take a job at any of the companies that presented at whatever they could pay me. They were that good and got me that fired up.

This is the brainchild of Project Heha, started by Sammy Lee.  Sammy took the idea of propagating sustainable happiness to new levels and, in the course of doing so, has created a multinational, multibillion-dollar company.  The phrase, “a rising tide lifts all boats,” was never truer. 

We need more of this in the world! 

California takes a huge step forward by requiring employers to be transparent about wages. Gone are the days when HR and a few high-level folks knew who gets paid what. The new law, created under the guise of equal pay for women, requires employers to reveal pay ranges for open positions upon request. It also prohibits policies forbidding employees from disclosing their wages. I think it’s just a matter of time until all CA employers list pay ranges with employment ads.

Companies like Glassdoor will add fields to their site to capture salary ranges that candidates discover. Before long, all job seekers will be able to avoid the lowballing game practiced by many companies. If you are unfamiliar with this scummy practice, it works like this. During the interview, an employer will ask you about your current salary and use the information to give you the lowest wage they can. The new law forbids this information being used when offering a salary, even if it is given voluntarily. But you should never share your salary history with a future employer.  The first person to talk about money loses.

Another centerpiece of the new law is that the burden now falls on the employer that wage differentials are based on factors unrelated to gender. So, if an employer files a gender based pay claim, the employer has to prove it’s not so, taking the burden off of the employee!

The age of wage transparency is upon us!  And I, for one, can’t wait!  The new law goes into effect after the new year.

Companies like SEMCO in Brazil are way ahead of the curve, not only are salaries shared, but employees can choose their salary, which everyone will know about. This social pressure keeps folks from overpaying themselves.

 

I think I have some of the answers.

A large part of it is the media. They make more money from fear and hate than from love and hope. The bad news is reported 17 times for every time the good news is reported.

Why do we crave bad news? It’s just the way our brains work. For tens of thousands of years, it was an evolutionary advantage to be afraid of things. It was a powerful survival mechanism. Yes, I say WAS.

Evolution is slow, most of the time. The world we live in now, at least in developed countries, is the safest in the history of time. There is the occasional blip in the crime rate, like the uptick in Chicago recently, but if you look at historical data on crime and violence, it’s at an all-time low and has been steadily going down for 100 years. WWII was the giant exception.

Many people who just read the above paragraph either didn’t know how safe the world is now, find it hard to believe, or are convinced the statement is dead wrong. It’s not an opinion. It’s a well researched fact.

This article is based on facts I’ve gleaned while researching various subjects. You could say, I have a research problem. The links you see are to the source material. Very little of what I’ve written is opinion.

When you hear the same bad things repeatedly, you start to believe them. It’s a simple form of brainwashing, and it’s very, very effective. This tactic is the main reason there is so much contention between political ideologies. But I digress.

Our brains identify things that might hurt or kill us to avoid them. And the media, based on ratings, keep feeding us more and more bad news because we are seeking it out. It’s a vicious cycle. It’s this symbiotic relationship between the media and the way our brains work that is at fault.

There is another evolutionary process at work that is an offshoot of fear. It’s fear of change.

Fear of change is at the heart of racism. Not changing meant stability and WAS an evolutionary advantage. But it’s now a serious evolutionary disadvantage. Unlike fear, which still has a place in our lives, there is such a thing as healthy fear. That is why we have an instinctive fear reaction when we walk to the edge of a cliff. Sure, not everyone is afraid of heights, I’m not, but that does not stop the physiological reaction of my heartbeat speeding up, that tightness in my stomach.

But the fear of change needs to go away! With the ever-accelerating rate of change, resisting change has become a strong evolutionary disadvantage. To say that we have advanced more in the last 200 years than in the last 2000 would be a big understatement. And the rate of change is only increasing. It will continue to grow as long as we have enough energy to keep the lights on.

It took 46 years before ¼ of the US population had adopted electricity. It only took seven years to get ¼ of us on the internet. It only took us five years to adopt smartphones. In less than a century, we increased the rate of technology adoption by 900%. Future adoptions of technology will be even faster.

A part of our society is experiencing mental health issues related to their inability to keep up with the pace of change. From an NIH study on change in China:

“…we believe in this case that a compelling causal narrative can be told about how a deliberate change of course in terms of economic structure and social organization has had psychological consequences.”

Their inability to deal with these changes is causing something similar to a fight or flight reaction. This puts people into a fear state, which shunts the blood away from the prefrontal cortex, causing them to have lower mental functioning and making them easier to manipulate. Perhaps we could start teaching resilience in schools like the US Armed Forces does to prevent PTSD. In any case, it’s a topic that deserves more research.

This is why demagogues create external targets to focus on the fear of a population. People who are afraid are easier to manipulate. For instance, my niece is afraid to travel outside the US because of ISIS, when the chance of death by a terrorist is less likely than getting crushed by furniture.

It’s not only technological changes that are speeding up. Social change has been accelerating as well. At least, it appears to be happening. It took us 89 years to abolish slavery and another hundred years to afford all the rights that other US citizens enjoy to apply to Blacks.

It’s fear of change from the shrinking White demographic that causes so much discrimination against folks who are not White. I can’t relate to a mindset that limits opportunities for people just because you want to get ahead. This was less of a problem when White’s had a bigger majority, but now that it’s rapidly shrinking, people who can’t adapt to social changes that will eventually make us all equal are freaking out. Um, this is America! The melting pot of the world What did you think was going to happen?

Black people have been suffering in America since the first time we stole them from their homes, bound, chained them, and made them slaves. By and large, that suffering has never stopped. It’s just changed. I remember being younger when I didn’t have the experience or capacity to understand why it was every other group of minorities who came to the US was able to rise out of poverty eventually. It just didn’t make sense to me.

We had the civil rights act; slavery was way in our past. Weren’t we all equal now? Why couldn’t they do what countless other minorities have done? For a long time, I thought it had to do with Black culture, I couldn’t conceive of anything else. I didn’t have the frame of reference.

I acquired a broader frame of reference in the last couple of years. I read an excellent book High Price, by Carl Hart, a neuroscientist researcher who happened to grow up in a poor Black family. The book is mainly autobiographical and contains some of the most recent research on addiction. It was this book that first started to give me context.

Then, I came across a short video about racism becoming more subtle and economically based, which sounded like a conspiracy. When I first watched it, I dismissed it out of hand because I don’t believe in conspiracies. Then I started to do some research, and the more I read, the more it made sense.

This is a quote from Lee Atwater that was featured in the video:

It has become a smoking gun for liberals and leftists, enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves.

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

I could not believe what I heard! Especially when I not only read this quote from Lee Atwater but listened to the recording. Atwater was an advisor to both Reagan and Bush and a past chairman of the Republican National Convention.

What demographic is hit hardest by cutting funding to public programs? The one at the bottom of our socio-economic structure. Poor Black people

If you look at the history of Black people in America, which is shamefully under-taught in our schools, as is the plight of Native Americans, the only demographic worse off than Black people. You will see a widespread and continuous pattern of racism and oppression.

From the mass jailing of Blacks in the south, post-slavery, Blacks in the south were jailed in large numbers for little to no reason to keep the southern economy flush. To Jim Crow and voter suppression in the south. While northerners like to villainize the south, segregated schools are still a problem in some parts of the US. The biggest offender? The state of New York! It turns out the northerners put a provision into Brown vs Education exempting them from segregation.

Then we come to the war on drugs, which I could write volumes about. It provided a lot more context. In 1914 the first drug laws were passed. At the time, America did not have a drug problem. There was no drug violence, and addiction was not destroying many lives. On average, 10% of people have an addiction problem, regardless of the addiction. That number has not ever changed.

Once drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and opium were made illegal, it created a lucrative business opportunity, one that men of violence filled. It’s also when the desire to make more potent drugs started. It’s just easier and less risky to transport smaller quantities. It also created a way for the government to harass and control minority populations.

By the 1930s, Harry Anslinger came along. The nation’s first drug czar. He used race baiting to convince us to vote for stronger drug laws and then went on to blackmail the world's countries using foreign aid.

He told white people that if Blacks, Chinese, and Mexicans got high, they would forget their “place” and get white women pregnant or become violent.

Then came Nixon. Who had a huge problem with antiwar people and blacks and used the same race-baiting arguments again. And in his footsteps, Regan. The man behind Watergate, Ehrlichman, said this about the war on drugs.

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The result is that Black men are jailed for drugs at a rate that is 15X higher than White men. At the same time, there are currently 17 White people for every Black person in the US.

Anyone with a basic understanding of math would look at those numbers and think something strange is happening. How could a demographic that is so small end up with such a disproportionately high number of drug convictions?

It’s very simple.

To convince ourselves that it was ok to enslave Black people, we decided they were subhuman. An idea that went on long after slavery ended. I’ve had more than one conversation with White people in the last year who believe that Black people don’t have the same genetic potential as White people. Something that the science of genetics has debunked. Thankfully, most of the people I know didn’t need that evidence.

What happens when you are at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, and you get a felony record? Your life is over. You’ll rarely ever get a chance at a decent job, and you lose the ability to vote! If you come out of jail and your partner is on social aid, you won’t have a place to live, as we have laws against that too.

And where is the only place in the US where slavery is legal? Prison. 2.2 million Black people are in prison in the US. They make up 35% of the people in prison. In the US. Private prisons make billions in profits from convict labor. The Prison population increased by 1600% from 1990 to 2009. At the same time period, crime decreased by 25%.

Crime has been steadily decreasing while convictions have skyrocketed. And we keep putting a disproportionately large number of Black people in jail.

Why does this happen? Our country was founded on the idea that black people are naturally subhuman and violent. It’s cancer in our minds. This meme isn’t limited to White people. It’s been so deeply embedded in our society that some black people believe they are less than.

It’s partly this that makes police target Black people for crime, and partly they are easy targets. A poor black person is much less likely to be able to afford a lawyer or have powerful friends who I'll come to their aid. Many cops have spoken out on this. When you have a choice between arresting a Black man in a poor neighborhood for crack, or a White man in an affluent neighborhood for cocaine, the Black man loses.

When I was nineteen, I was arrested with a fair quantity of LSD, my well-connected dad called a friend who was a lieutenant with the drug squad in a nearby city. He told me exactly what to do and how to act to get a good outcome. And it worked. I have no felony record. A poor black person in this situation would have gone to jail.

When I get pulled over by the police, I don’t fear for my life. I’m an old white guy. The same can’t be said for millions of Black people across the US.

If you found anything surprising in this article, be curious. Learn about these things that surprised you so you can help erode ignorance and be more compassionate.

We need to put more money into research around the fear of change and the effects of rapid change on people and society. And help people better adapt to social change.

We need to end the failed and failed war on drugs.

White people need to stop this bullshit “us first” attitude and start making a real social change to lift the folks on the bottom of our socio economic structure. A rising tide lifts all boats.

We must teach our children the truth about how this country was founded and how we have treated its indigenous people and Blacks.

We need to end the deeply embedded cultural message that says Black people are less than or violent.

Our government needs to be forced to create a more level playing field. We have more than enough wealth to fix all the problems our country faces. We need to find the will to make it so.

It’s in that spirit that I have started studying trump. I’ve never done research on a political figure before except having to analyze Clinton’s inaugural address for an assignment in college.

The 1/3/2017 episode of Frontline is worth watching. I watched it a second time last night and took notes. Most of this article comes from that episode.

Here are the highlights that many people may not know.

Trump was born into luxury and privilege.

His father was a driven workaholic who taught all his children from a young age that only winning mattered. Losing was not an option. He was one of five children. He was out of control, and his parents could not deal with him. He was the only child to be sent away to a boarding school. A rigorous military school.

Trump moved to Manhattan and tried to break into real estate there. He found a Mentor in Roy Cohn, a protege of Joe McCarthy. Cohn, known for his lack of a moral compass, trained trump to be tough and taught him to “hit back harder than they ever hit you,” which is why he always slings shit at anyone who does not do what he wants. Never admit failure. Claim it as a victory.

This is the straightforward pattern that Trump uses repeatedly.

1. Do whatever he wants.

2. If anyone objects, accuse them of something worse and don’t let up.

3. If you do fail, claim it as a victory.

Trump does not change.

Which means he is straightforward to manipulate. Good for people who want to influence him but bad for the US. It’s very likely that Russian intelligence knew this before deciding to influence the election.

He used this tactic for the first time when the government sued him for discriminatory housing practices in NYC. His family won’t rent to Blacks. Roy Cohn countersues the government. They lose big time and then claim it as a victory. He never admits a defeat.

He built the Trump tower at age 33. He conned the city government into inflating the floor numbers from 58 to 68. Even his buildings are lies.

This is the only commercial building he owns, but he does not have the land under it.

He believes if you say something enough times, people will believe it. He feels diminished outside of the spotlight. He resents the elite because they don’t accept him. He started on an enormous buying spree, described as being out of control and manic by those close to him. In the late 80s, Trump ran for president.

His platform:

“I want strength and extreme confidence at the helm of this country. I am tired of seeing this country being ripped off by so many foreign nations.”

Sound familiar? Trump does not change.

A woman was raped in NYC. He took out a full-page ad calling for killing the accused black kids, who were later proven innocent after years in prison. Trump never apologizes.

An analyst writes an article predicting the failure of the Taj Mahal Casino. Trump gets the reporter fired. The casino fails shortly after. It’s his first big failure. 3 billion in debt.

Banks see him as a great promoter, not as a CEO. Not a businessman, a showman.

With his casino failure and his debt skyrocketing, the banks seize control. They believed his properties needed his name. They kept him on to promote the business and gave him an allowance.

Trump goes public, makes a killing, and declares bankruptcy three times. His investors lose billions. He claims this as a loss on his taxes, which it was not, and does not pay taxes for years and years after.

He believes it’s ok to try to pull anything on anyone and that we should all be out for ourselves. As you can see, that goes for countries as well.

He backs off of politics.

Then he starts the Apprentice, which runs for 14 seasons.

There is a theory that Obama's roasting of him at the press dinner spurred him to run for President again.

He starts moving back into politics and champions the birther movement.

He announced his run in 2015. It’s a crazy rant.

The rest is history.

This is the story of a teenage bully that never grew up. Someone who is desperate for adoration and approval, who is thin-skinned and easy to manipulate. His friends say he is the same person now that they new in military school. Trump does not change.

Once you know what to look for, predicting and noticing his behavior patterns is straightforward.

I hope that major news outlets publish a synopsis of his behavior patterns. If enough people learn how he works, it will stop being effective.

If you only have time to read one book and your business needs a booster shot for innovation and engagement, this is the book you need. 

This photo was shared under the Creative Commons Attribution License and has been taken from Tsahi Levent-Levi’s Flickr photo stream.

It’s a lean book that is easy to read. It has just enough information for anyone to understand why building a bottom-up innovation program is important, how to get buy-in, how to implement the program, and ensure its success! Better yet, it can be done with the smallest of budgets. 

I’ve read many books on innovation and employee engagement, but this is the first one that ties it all together and gives us the plan to make it happen in our businesses. 

This is a “how to” book with just enough theory to launch the innovation program. 

I work for an internet marketing startup, and after reading the first chapter, I was going to use the information in this book to inject innovation into our team’s DNA. I’m going to create innovation training in conjunction with our Bright Idea Box Program, based on this book and my other research, books like: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson, and The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work by Theresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. 

The book is written in 3 parts:

Part One - The Innovation

Part Two - The Program

Part Three - The Engagement

Jag breaks down business innovation into four categories: 

Revenue Generation 

Cost Reduction 

Business Process

Business Model.

“The results of innovation can emerge as a new or improved product, a new management strategy, lowered cost, added convenience for customers, or selling existing products in new ways or to new markets,” says Jag. When my team talks about innovation, it normally pertains to new products, niches, or marketing ideas. We overlook some places that have huge potential, like improving business processes. 

Things like business processes and adding value for customers often get overlooked because they’re not sexy. 

How much better would things work if everyone was thinking about improving the way we work instead of just the people whose job it is? Reframing innovation like this is hugely helpful. 

Taking advantage of research in neuroscience, Jag uses chunking to help us to remember the steps necessary to implement our innovation program using the acronym MASTER:

Mobilize- Get people involved

Amass- Collect Ideas

Support- Assuring commitment

Triage- Screen Ideas

Execute- Implement Ideas

Recognize- Recognize team members  

Jag says, “Innovation = Invention + Execution + Adoption” in other words, ideas without implementations are like seeds that get planted but never watered and tended to. It’s not enough to have good or even great ideas. They have to be captured, evaluated and, if they are worthy, implemented.

The author shows us how to get buy-in from executives, managers, and team members. He suggests we should hire partners, not employees. This is crucial for maximizing team engagement. 

Question: In a bacon-and-egg breakfast, what’s the difference between the Chicken and the Pig?

Answer: The Chicken is involved, but the Pig is committed!

One of the best ways to engage team members is to raise their level of commitment. Be the pig! Be committed. When people are empowered and supported to make potentially staggering contributions to the company's success, they are much more likely to be committed.  

The author also gives us a great way to filter out ideas that don’t add value to the business. When an idea is submitted four questions must be answered: 

1. What is the name of the idea:

2. Description:

3. Benefits:

4. Cost-Benefit Rationale:

The first two are no-brainers, the third is necessary, and the last is gold! Requiring your team to answer these questions makes them think their idea through and sends half-baked ideas back for more development. Anyone who participates in the program will learn how to do a cost/benefit analysis. In other words, they will learn to think like business owners!

This is easily the best business book I’ve read in the last year. If your team lacks engagement, like 74% of employees in the United States, and innovation is something they hear mentioned in the news, you might want to give this book a read and put its ideas to good use. 

Many of us do many things every day to shoot ourselves in the foot, and I am no exception. Up until about two months ago, there was a story I told myself that was not true. My whole life, I’m almost 50, I had been telling myself that I sucked with names. I sucked with names! I would meet someone at work, at an interview, or a party, and a few minutes later, I would forget their name. I told myself, “It’s just how my brain works.” It was so bad that I kept a list of all the people I worked with next to my phone so I could look them up as needed.

Then, in my quest for self-improvement, I finally read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” It blew my mind!  In what felt like another lifetime, during my very brief Amway experience, some folks tried to get me to read this book, but the title put me off. In my naive youth, I did not understand that all of us try to influence each other all the time, which is not really what the book is about. As a result of reading the book and following its practices, you will make more friends and be more influential, but that is only because you will be a nicer, more considerate person. 

Shortly after reading the book, I was in Kuala Lumpur on vacation and staying at a guesthouse. I decided that I was going to try to remember everyone's name that I interacted with. It was a great guesthouse, and I went on a few group outings that day. I hung out with ten people and could remember all of their names! For the first time in my life, I was good with names! Me!  I still remember 4 of them. And the only thing that changed is my perspective.  I’ve done this with several other things I thought I was terrible at now, and I’m convinced that I, you, that everyone can learn and be good at whatever they are willing to put effort into.

Changing perspective has so many other possibilities to make our lives better. Changing from a pessimist to an optimist will increase your health, earn you more money, make you happier and result in better relationships. It will even lengthen your life!  If someone cuts you off in traffic or exhibits some other sort of public behavior that you find offensive, make up a good excuse for their behavior in your mind instead of thinking the worst of them. Doing this will diminish any resentments you might have and help you let go of any anger you feel. In fact, compassion for someone going through something bad will leave you feeling good. And since you are likely never to find out the reason for their behavior, you might as well choose the response that serves you best. 

Learning to be more flexible in our thinking, to see things from other’s perspectives, and changing our perspectives gives us more control over one of the only things we are in control of in our lives, our minds. So why not look around the corner?

I started Eating Lightbulbs because I was inspired by Dan Pink and his book Drive to change the world. I started out naively thinking that if I started doing something exciting and important that everything else would just work out. That somehow something would come together and my research and insights would make a difference.

That was at the beginning of 2010. I was out of work after getting laid off and had just come back from spending three months traveling around Asia. I had some money in the bank and a supportive girlfriend! I started this blog and read all the sources that Dan used to write Drive and kept on reading.  A year and a half later, I ran out of money and had to start looking for work.

That year and a half of research was one of the most exciting and enjoyable times of my life. I love doing research, learning about new ideas, and figuring out how to apply these new discoveries. My brain was fully turned on for the first time since I had graduated from college!

The job hunt I embarked on was highly stressful. In a year, I applied for 400 jobs, got 40 responses, and made it to the final interview 12 times. With Out A Single Offer. At the same time, my partner was diagnosed with an immune system disease, her uncle was diagnosed with cancer, and I was diagnosed with hypogonadism. By the end of the year, my long-term relationship was dissolving. In short, it was the worst year I have had in the last 20.  2012 is a four-letter word!

In the end, I created an opportunity for a consulting gig and worked for myself for six months. Just before the end of the contract, my relationship imploded, and I decided it was time to leave the building. So, I hit the road, and here you find me, alive and well in Bangkok.

My original idea for this blog was to only write about topics with empirical evidence, “Just that facts, ma’am.” I am coming to realize that people have too many facts, and what they want are answers. I have also figured out that it is stories that stick with us. It is stories that help our ideas come to life and live on.

A year and a half in Toastmasters taught me that I really like to write and give speeches. I have no problem talking in public about the most personal things, and it turns out that when I reveal something deeply personal during a speech, it helps connect me to the audience like iron to a magnet. So, here I am again to serve you, and this time it’s personal!

I stayed at Otres 2 beach in Sihounikville for a few nights. It is pretty chill, and the water is excellent for swimming. After riding a bike for 5 weeks, it was just what I needed to relax. I spent a day on a long-tail boat doing some snorkeling. I’d not recommend it. After the Philippines, the snorkeling in Vietnam and Cambodia was disappointing. The best thing about Otres 2 is that it is not overdeveloped yet, and there are almost no hawkers!  It was swim, read, sun, eat and repeat!

Then I took a boat to Koh Rong. From what I heard from others and read, this island is one of the last undeveloped islands in Cambodia. I booked a room for five nights. It was just OK for me. It’s a very social island. Most everyone is concentrated in one place. The only locals are those who work/live there. it’s basically a backpacker island with primarily western food. The issue with all the beaches I’ve seen in Cambodia and Vietnam is the trash on the beaches. Koh Rong is no exception. Most of Asia seems to treat the ocean as its own personal dump and much of it turns up on the beaches. This makes me ill, having grown up in beach culture, where no one would throw trash in the ocean. 

I spent a night in downtown Sihanoukville, so I could quickly jump on the bus to Phnom Pehn to catch my plane to Bangkok. It’s not a nice place, full of young people partying their ass’s off and super overdeveloped and commercial. Sorry Cambodia, but you did not make my list of places I would like to live.

It is a short ride from Nha Trang to Da Lat and a beautiful one. I spent a few hours driving through the mountains and had a welcome respite from the heat. Da Lat is a slowly crumbling French mountain town that just happens to be in Vietnam. I am told much of it resembles Paris. But since I have not been to Paris, I could not say. I stayed in Da Lat for two nights, which was pretty chill. I took a walk around the lake and went to the Flower Gardens. De Lat is famous for its flowers, which it exports worldwide. It has a climate similar to Napa, so they grow grapes and make wine. Sadly I did not try the wine.

After I got out of the mountains and was headed for Saigon, the towns started to meld together, and soon the road turned into one long town with no green space. I started early, as it was a long riding day, and arrived in Saigon at my hostel in the middle of the afternoon. Thanks to the help of my trusty GPS app, I did not get lost once! I’d been to Saigon for a few days in 2009, but I was a tourist and only saw a small part of the city.

On the drive-in, I started losing my cool with the other folks on the road. My “irritation with other drivers” meter was in the red! I had considered selling my bike in Saigon and taking the bus through Cambodia. Getting highly irritated was the like seeing a neon light saying, “sell!”  I can not drive safely once I start getting too irritated. I start taking chances, going too fast, and I become a road hazard, which is challenging in Vietnam.

The next day I wrote my for-sale ad and posted it on various online classified sites including Craigslist. And I waited. And waited some more. Five days later, the only responses I received were from people who could not read my clearly written ad and thought I was in Hanoi. I started getting nervous. Should I lower the price? Should I try to find a charity to give away my expensive toy to? Should I stop thinking about how much money I’ll lose if I don’t sell the bike and have ice cream? Yes! And what an ice cream it was. There’s a french ice cream shop in Saigon that turns ice cream into art.

On the 6th day, I got a bite, and another, and a third! An American Expat was going to come by after work, and then a French guy wanted to come by earlier. I let the American guy know he’d have to get here sooner if we wanted a shot. The American called first, after all. The French guy showed up, gave the bike a once over, took it for a ride, and said he wanted to buy it, but that he had to go get the money. I said yes. Then the American showed up with cash. I took his cash and called the French guy and gave him the bad news. Since I did not ride as long as I had planned, I ended up paying about what I would have for a rental after I took a loss selling the bike. Maybe I could have got more, but a week in Saigon was enough.

I did have some good times in Saigon. I made a Vietnamese friend in Hanoi, and she lives in Saigon. We spent a Saturday afternoon together, eating, riding around on her scooter, and had a nice walk. When we met, she was interviewing with the Italian embassy for a visa, which they granted her. After we hung out, she had to go out of town on business and then flew to Italy. Yen, I hope you had a great time in Italy, if you are still reading my blog, drop me an email, I only have your mobile number.

The night I sold my bike, I went out and celebrated. An Argentine steak house serves steak from Australia and the US. So I dropped about 1.5 million dong ($70) on dinner and drinks. I sat at the bar and hit it off with the bartenders. After I ordered my first drink, they started making me custom drinks, and after dinner, they poured me shots of homemade caramel vodka on the house. It was the first time I had steak in months. I decided to do one touristy thing, and on my last day, I went to the former US embassy. It was a neat building. It’s easy to forget that Vietnam is a communist country, then sometimes you remember. 

Seven weeks is the longest I’ve spent in one country outside the US, with the exception of Italy, when I was teaching and taking classes there in the late ’90s. It was great to see a country from top to bottom and go places most westerners will never see. I love traveling off the beaten trail, and on this trip, there were times when I was off the trail altogether. Vietnam, specifically Saigon, is a place I could live.

Hue is the most beautiful city I have seen in Vietnam, it was the old imperial capital, and it still shows. It’s also a place for artists, and education is highly valued here. As I head south, the food gets better. One can only eat so much noodle soup!

I had a great lunch with a couple of local specialties and a beer for under $3 bucks.

In Hue, I went on my first guided tour in Vietnam and got on my first bus in this country. Considering that I had a small hangover from two happy hours from the night before, it was an outstanding choice, we visited some of the emperors’ tombs, a pagoda, and the Citadel. Our tour guide was outstanding, and the tour included a buffet lunch and a boat ride. It was a great way to spend the day and interesting to see the country from a nonmotorcycle perspective.

Hoi An is just south of Da Nang, it’s a sleepy little beach town with great food and an unending supply of touts. I spent a day at the beach and got a bit of a burn, so no beach for me today. I’ve spent most of the day so far catching up with my writing dear readers. The hostel I stayed at here has a pool! The heat was almost unbearable on my ride down, especially with all the safety gear I wore. Thank science for evaporative cooling.

It’s 500 km from Hoi An to Nha Trang, so I stopped in a nontouristy place for the night, Quy Nhon, there’s a guest house in a village just outside of town that I really wanted to stay at but they were booked up for several weeks. I stayed at a hotel with a welcoming and friendly staff. It’s one of the few places I’ve been that have no touts and where no one tried to rip me off or quote a tourist price. I went 36 hours without having any hassles with the price of anything.

I took the road that the Top Gear folks raved about during their motorcycle ride in Vietnam. It’s a nice road, but the claim that it is one of the best coastal roads in the world is not true. Apparently, these guys have not ridden on the east or west coast in the US.

Then I arrived in Nha Trang, it is over touristed, the beach is not that great, and it is full of Russians. From what I understand, from here south, it is Russian Central. I took a day to chill and took a day to go to an amusement park. You must take the world’s longest tramway to the park. The park was a bit of a letdown. I went for the water park, but if you have been to a half-decent water park in the US, it just doesn’t compare. However, the tram ride was quite good. On the upside, I had and good cheeseburger and some excellent Indian food!