What Matters Now

Tough year? Need inspiration? What Matters Now, a free book with contributions from a range of writer/thinkers whose work I follow and deeply admired, is a must read.

A few nuggets:

There are tens of thousands of businesses making many millions a year in profits that still haven’t ever heard of twitter, blogs or facebook. Are they all wrong? Have they missed out or is the joke really on us? They do business through personal relationships, by delivering great customer service and it’s working for them. They’re more successful than most of those businesses who spend hours pontificating about how others lose out by missing social media and the latest wave. And yet they’re doing business. Great business. – Howard Mann

If we want engagement, and the mediocrity busting results it produces, we have to make sure people have autonomy over the four most important aspects of their work:

Task – What they do
Time – When they do it
Technique – How they do it
Team – Whom they do it with.

After a decade of truly spectacular underachievement, what we need now is less management and more freedom – fewer individual automatons and more autonomous individuals. – Daniel Pink

If you’re at a coffee shop, and you spill coffee on someone by accident, what do you say? You’ll be horrified and say “Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” When you mean it you say you’re sorry – it’s a primal response. You wouldn’t say “Oh my god, I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused!” But that’s exactly how most companies respond when they make a big mistake. Mistakes happen. How you apologize matters. Don’t bullshit people – just say “I’m sorry.” And mean it. – Jason Fried

When the economy tanks, it’s natural to think of yourself first. You have a family to feed a mortgage to pay. Getting more appears to be the order of business.
It turns out that the connected economy doesn’t respect this natural instinct. Instead, we’re rewarded for being generous. Generous with our time and money but most important generous with our art.- Seth Godin