25 September
2010
This really surprised me. When googling “freedom at work”, one of the first things that comes out is this famous nazi slogan – German phrase that can be translated as “work liberates” or “work makes one free”. Not much else is popping out, really. Yes, there are few sites dealing with the first two levels [...]
19 September
2010
“Dead Poets Society” is a 1989 film starring Robin Williams and directed by Peter Weir. Set in 1959 at a conservative and aristocratic boys prep school, it tells the story of an English teacher who inspires his students to change their lives of conformity through his teaching of poetry and literature.” That’s what Wikipedia says [...]
8 September
2010
There was a conference I spoke at with the following subtitle: “Is there any new vision in HR?” The life of corporations has always been fascinating to me. So I certainly cannot avoid commenting on this matter here on my blog. The life of a unit that so fundamentally affects most of our lives is [...]
2 September
2010
I asked some people whether they would be bothered if a drop of someone else’s urine were in a bowl of their favorite soup. Nine out of ten said that they wouldn’t even touch it. That seems logical when talking about eating, but let’s look at it as a metaphor. Imagine that the soup symbolizes [...]
14 August
2010
Zappos is definitely a business to learn from. It grew from almost zero sales in 1999 to over a billion US dollars ten years later. Its employees belong among the happiest and most engaged workforce. The same counts for the customers. And Tony Hsieh, its CEO? Little weird but definitely one of the masterminds behind [...]
16 July
2010
It was back in the early eighties when I planted these two larches at my parent’s garden…two little, identical trees. In case you’ve never heard of this kind of a tree, they are native to the cooler, temperate northern hemisphere where I happen to live. Here, a grown larch reaches from fifteen up to fifty [...]
I was born in May, 1971 in Lanskroun, a small town some three hours drive east of Prague, the capital of what is now known as the Czech republic. It was Czechoslovakia back then, a part of the Eastern Block, a Communist country, a Russian satellite or whatever the names we used to call it. [...]
28 June
2010
Those of you flying Southwest may have met the guy. Or you just saw some of his YouTube videos as I did. Or you may have experienced some other Southwest people on the job. What a difference to what most of us are used to while flying! What a breath of fresh air! Let people [...]
13 June
2010
What comes to your mind when you hear the word “W-O-R-K”? I ask this question at our seminars a lot. I usually get pretty gruesome answers. I hear words like: “must-do, obligatory, hard, it sucks, pain, oh no!, damn it, wish I had more free time,…” You name it! The more I try to research [...]
30 May
2010
At a party I went to recently, a friend and I discussed some of the Woody Allen’s movies. The talk came to one of his recent works named “Viki Christina Barcelona”. You may have seen it. Perhaps you remember the scene where the main character – Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) brings his friend Vicki (Rebecca Hall) to his father’s [...]
