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Calm your Organization’s Monkey Mind

Aug 4, 2015 by Andy Kanefield 0 Comments

calm your organizations monkey mind blog“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

-Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner in Economic Sciences

Our current work environments seem to be on a trajectory for greater and greater distraction. We are constantly keeping up with shifting priorities and an explosion of goals, initiatives, projects and trends.

Just as mindfulness practice can help you refocus in your personal life, integrating organizational mindfulness into the workplace will help the company advance towards its primary goals.gathering of the games speaker-01

Finding Organizational Mindfulness

Identifying your company’s key pain points will help address the areas that need the most attention. Answering these two questions will help you find those areas for improvement and lead to better organizational mindfulness.

1. Is doing business with your company convenient for customers?

If you’re promising convenience, you must ask these questions when making organizational decisions (e.g. how does investing in this capital expenditure provide greater convenience for our clients?):

  • What is the value of convenience to your customers? How do you measure it?
  • How do you talk about convenience for customers in your meetings?
  • How does your annual operating plan demonstrate investment in greater convenience for your customers

2. Does your organization claim to be unique or better than the competition?

If you’ve put a stake in the ground as the most innovative company among your peers, must include these as a filter for organizational decisions (e.g. how does investing in this capital expenditure promote greater innovation?):

  • What does innovation mean? How do you measure innovation?
  • How do you discuss innovation in your meetings?
  • How does your annual operating plan demonstrate investment to improve innovation?

What Can You Do Now?

Focus is hard work, personally and professionally.  What are you doing to promote it in your organization?

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Andy Kanefield
Written by Andy Kanefield

The genesis of Dialect, Inc. was an integration of what Andy learned as the parent of a son, Parker, with special needs and as a partner in an advertising agency. As a parent, Andy learned about the brain, development, strengths, and that there are certain patterns to how our brains are wired. As an advertising executive, Andy noticed that often organizations weren’t wired to deliver what they promised to customers and were often out of sync internally because there was no intentional, coherent system that tied departments and people together. The integration of a systems perspective for organizations and the built-in filters of individuals led to the development of a model for promoting organizational sync. Andy serves as a board member of The St. Louis Arc, a non-profit agency dedicated to helping individuals with special needs and their families. Prior to the founding of Dialect in 2003, Andy was a partner in a branding company for 14 years. Andy served for many years on the board of Earthways, an environmental education and consulting organization, served as President of the St. Louis chapter of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, on the board of The Belle Center – supporting children with special needs, and was on the marketing committee of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Andy received his B.A. in Sociology from the University of Colorado and has completed behavioral training from the nationally-recognized Judevine Center. Andy has had speaking engagements in both corporate and academic settings.

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Our approach to running a company was developed to help close one of the biggest gaps in business: the gap between managers and employees. We call our open-book approach The Great Game of Business. What lies at the heart of The Game is a very simple proposition: The best, most efficient, most profitable way to operate a business is to give everybody in the company a voice in saying how the company is run and a stake in the outcome. Let us teach you how to develop a culture of ownership, where employees think, act and feel like owners.