21st
February
Chemistry on the Run
When Chemistry Running Club appeared in my outlook calendar and reminds me twice a week that I should be exercising, the all too common thought went through my mind “Exercise what a chore, I don’t have time for it, its something that’s only suitable for the young or the athletic!”
Wrong…..
The word exercise comes from the Latin exercere, meaning to keep busy or at work. Which we all do in one sense, but ironically what the typical adult does at work is sit in a desk chair for eight hours, plus a sitting-down commute both ways, no physical exercise there then!
We all know that exercise improves your physical and mental health, can boost your energy and mood, and assist weight loss, which most of us at Chemistry are trying to do at this time of year! But can it also help you improve the way you work?
Exercise helps improve all aspects of your life, including work productivity, in a number of different ways:
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10th
February
Let There Be Light!
Ever had indigestion? I have – yesterday, in fact, at a working lunch to discuss progress on a challenging new project. Chemistry are reaching out to collaborate with creative students around some exciting new content for our website and whilst we’re really excited about it, we’ve never done it before so we don’t really know what to expect. ‘Not really knowing’ was a bit uncomfortable, hence the pasta battling with my digestive system!
If you take ‘not really knowing’ and add a bit of work pressure – and there’s plenty of that to go round, after all, most of us will ‘revert to type’, relying on habitual behaviours and ways of thinking to cope with challenge and uncertainty. Which is understandable, but plays havoc with the ROI on behavioural development programmes in businesses up and down the country. It also poses a real risk to their survival – here’s why.
There are no ‘light bulbs’ in our comfort zone. The territory is so familiar we can find our way in the dark. So this is not a place to see things from a new angle and fire our imagination. We don’t go there to make new connections, discover new possibilities and so create new and inspiring ideas. And if we are not challenging and inspiring ourselves when we operate from this place, the same will be true for our colleagues, employees, customers and suppliers. As time goes by, our comfort zone will become their ‘discomfort zone’. Faced with an increasingly challenging environment, they will look elsewhere for the new ideas they need to meet the challenges they face.
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9th
February
Just Keep Peddling
It’s been quite a start to the year here at Chemistry, and we all seem to be running faster that ever before. It creates an amazing buzz around the place of frantic excitement and the feeling that we are on the verge of something amazing. The flip side of that is that we might be on the verge of crashing and undoing all of the great work that we have done.
So how do avoid this crash and achieve the upside? Simple, (to say at least) we need to share the burden, we need to get other people involved and we need to ask others for help. This coupled with good organisation is a recipe for ensuring that nobody drops the ball on anything.
Speaking personally I am not the best at delegating things and bringing other people in to help me out, instead taking the view that “it will be easier just to do it myself rather than get them to a level to do it for me”. What I have realised over the last few weeks is that this approach doesn’t work and is a sure fire way to a breakdown (which I nearly had last week!).
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2nd
February
Pushing the “like” button; why Facebook is worth every cent.
It’s about to be valued somewhere, they say, between $85-$130 billion.
So this Facebook thing… It’s got no discernable “product” (it’s actually just an online space), yet it commands a mind ripping valuation. Why?
There’s something that Facebook have tapped into, that started in the 1980s when consumerism really started to be driven by individual desires (think they called it the ‘me’ decade), rather than by what producers deemed appropriate to consume.
And it’s this: Facebook users see Facebook as an extension of themselves, as opposed to a separate entity.
You couldn’t get a much purer version of it.
Facebook facilitates a process of people tapping into their higher motivational and human needs. And once you can get individuals to personally identify with the product or thing they’re engaging with, you create ‘fans’, not just consumers. You’re getting them to push the ‘like’ button.
And Facebook is now the key to other companies engaging with the interests, needs and motivations of the modern Internet user/consumer. There is nothing more valuable that currently exists on the market anywhere.
What’s interesting to me is how business people can apply this concept. What does ‘pushing the like button’ mean for us bods with a few less 0’s attached to our valuation…
For me there are 3 key aspects that the “like” button refers to:
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