Only two weeks ago Melbourne was sweltering in nearly 40^o, last weekend we were with thousands at the beach, and as is typical Melbourne, the weather has now turned. (I spent the weekend with Paul Kelly’s Wintercoat playing in my head as background music.) Our growing 9 year old needed some warmer clothes so Maria was off with her for a shopping excursion; I decided to tag along and wander the shops for a couple of hours. I didn’t make it past Borders.

I find myself jealous for the wisdom and perspective of the authors. I admire the creativity and discipline necessary to write a novel, let alone a good one. I browse the table of the latest releases and get drawn into the amazing experiences of the writers. Inevitably I wander to the leadership and management sections …

I smile inwardly at the variety of voices competing to convince the business world that their ideas will make a difference. I find some familiar and trusted authors, it feels a bit like wandering though a big house and finding a room you’ve spent lots of time in … comfortable and engaging. Then, as is my custom, I intentionally seek out some odd titles, ones that challenge my comfort and sense of what is right or worthwhile and it reminds me again how wonderfully diverse people’s experience and knowledge is. How can so many people’s views be simultaneously important enough to warrant telling the world?

I used to think that ‘truth’ was about purity of knowledge, a kind of an essence that could be distilled by investigation and rigour. The discipline of truth finding was about peeling away the layers of subjectivity and discarding that which was tainted by experience and limited perspective. The bookshop invites another way seeking truth.

Everyone’s perspective and experience has legitimacy, they teach us something. Everyone’s beliefs make perfect sense to them. No one behaves in ways that don’t fit with their view of reality at the time. To get a full appreciation of reality, the task is therefore not so much to attempt to eliminate the ‘impurity’ of subjectivity, but to embrace it as another window into the world as it is (experienced). In other words, an accurate picture of truth is developed by considering as many perspectives as possible, not by convincing ourselves over and over that our particular vista is somehow paramount. This of course doesn’t mean it is not appropriate to argue the case for what we ‘see’, simply that our wisdom in ‘seeing’ is enhanced by appreciating what other are simultaneously seeing.

Every single title in the bookshop offers a ray of perspective on the object at the centre called life. I find the prospect of basking in as many of those rays as possible over a lifetime journey immensely attractive.

And by the way, with two (and one soon-to-be) teenage daughters, the purchase for the day was Kaz Cooke’s typical witty, candid and insightful tome called ‘Girl Stuff’.

How was your Easter? With the four day Easter break so early this year the weather was warm, and the rain last night made it even better - the water tank was getting low. I am thinking back over the last four days, feeling refreshed and wondering what contributes to that feeling … we all know that time away from work doesn’t necessarily leave us feeling energised.

I started keeping a diary when I was 14 or 15 years old. In those days the notes were just records of activity, no reflections or opinion. Maria gives me a hard time that not only was my diary-taking a simple list of activity … it tended to be the same set of things repeated week after week. But my teenage years were happy ones .. full of simple pleasures. And so was this last long weekend.

Reading: I wasn’t up for sleep one night, so spent half the night reading Harrison Owen’s book on Open Space Technology.

Swimming: Usual drill except I took Johanna with me and she swam in indoors while I looked at the black line.

Bike riding: 3 times Johanna and I (once with Rachel) peddled along the Merri trail which winds its way through parklands in the northern suburbs and past our house.

Cleaning: the shower is my job

Cooking: Inspired by Jamie Oliver’s experience cooking for local Italians who turned their noses up at his fancy flavours, I slow baked some tomatoes with oregano from our garden and tossed it with some ‘rags’ of home made pasta. Wonderful.

Friends: We visited some friends who were camping down at Cumberland River. It seemed half of Melbourne was down there, naturally there were thousands at Bells Beach for the Pro surfing, but Anglesea and Lorne were also packed. CR is a superb spot … our friends have been going to the same spot with a bunch of other families for years. Two of our girls joined them this year.

Surfing: Of course, being down the surf coast meant I had to spend a couple of hours trying to catch some waves.

TV: Maria and I watched an old movie, Thirteen Days, the story of how close we came to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis.

Music: Our family room has a computers, TV and music, each with capacity to listen via headphones, so we can be together rather than separated. While Maria was reading beside me and a couple of the kids were on the computers I found myself watching/ listening to a music channel counting down the ‘best 1000 songs of all time’!! I spent an hour and a half thoroughly immersed in quality songs, the words and music reaching out of the box and grabbing my soul.

I even washed the cars ….

And went grocery shopping,

And then yesterday we ripped out the tomato plants to make way for some winter vegies.

There is an old Kellogg’s Corn Flakes advertisement that bore the tag line, ‘the simple things in life are often the best.’ My Easter was full of simple things.

I hope you had a good one too.

We took a branding risk moving from our architect renovated vaulted ceiling warehouse in Albert Park to the grand Victorian house in West Melbourne. I need not have worried. Roslin (as the house is called), has not only been good for our branding, it has offered other advantages I hadn’t anticipated. This has prompted some pondering about the role of the work environment.

At high school, my two favourite subjects were technical drawing and art. (How did I end up with a pure maths degree?) A latent love for architecture and design has followed me through adult life. The ideas of how people interact with space has always held my interest, whether reflecting on Naomi Klein’s ideas about public spaces (No Logo chapter 13) or my own discovery of cooking pleasures after renovating our kitchen. If you share this fascination, I recommend you get your hands on Alain De Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness. The first 100 pages or so in particular are spectacular reading. But I digress.

I visited Shirley during the week. Before we enjoyed the sophisticated dark of the European cafe and winebar in Spring St. she showed me Arup’s impressive new offices, typical of the new kinds of spaces that are peppering corporate workspaces these days. But as an article in Friday’s edition of the Financial Review’s Boss Magazine says,

“…work environments that help get the most out of people - which boast the design finesse the modern worker expects - are not the norm.”

George, who owns and restored Roslin has treated us at Ergo and our network of clients and associates to a building of exceptional quality. It was the awe of the building that first captivated us. What I hadn’t anticipated was the sense of how the environment invites quality work. One almost feels embarrassed to deliver mediocrity within its walls.

We have tried to create different spaces within the building. No one has a permanent desk. All spaces are shared. we’ve got an open kitchen dining area, a modern board room, a ‘bankers-lamp, leather-top-desk’ style library, an open airy hot desking space and two outdoor areas. Each is designed for different moods and work styles. I reckon it works.

As I’ve had the opportunity to talk about this with people there is a sense of ‘derr’. Of course it is true that the environment affects the way people work. But if it is so self-evident, why are workplaces environments that inspire so rare? We have certainly lacked imagination on how to organise our office environments.

Sure, money is a factor, but where there is a creative will, there is a way. I’m not embarrassed to say that we furnished our place mostly from eBay. My suspicion is that managers have considered employees and their environments a cost rather than an asset, and have for the most part have forfeited considerable business value by overseeing very ordinary office environments. I wonder what our workplaces would look like if we embraced the link between inspiring environments and productivity.

I’m interested in people’s experiences of how different work environments influenced their motivation and effectiveness at work. Please do tell…

I love and hate public holidays.

I love them because, like this weekend just gone, it brings people out of their homes into the public spaces. They move slower, seem to smile more, and engage with other people as part of a collective whole … whether they are at a festival, or queuing at a supermarket checkout.

I hate them because we can’t bill. And this season is a shocker. In Melbourne we’ve got 5 of them in a few months. (We so need a redistribution of public holidays; the long stretch between the Queens birthday in June and Melbourne Cup in November is gruelling. Good for billing but.)

At the end of the day, public holidays, when sucked for regenerative value, are fantastic because people need refreshing. Which brings me to something I have been pondering of late …

I did an interview for an audio magazine called Business Essentials last week. (great publication by the way) In the context of describing Ergo Consulting and what we stand for, the question ‘isn’t that idealistic?’ was posed. It got me thinking again about how traditional business thinking makes it pretty easy to appear radical. I thought the same thing when reading last week’s Economist, whose special report on Asset Management was essentially about funds management, which is not how I think about business assets.

12 months ago I was fortunate to meet pioneer business thinker Jay Bragdon, whose book called Profit for Life (Published by The Society for Organisational Learning, 2006) I had read when it was released . Jay argues the case for Living Asset (people and nature) Stewardship and has researched over many years the performance of companies who look after their living assets, as well as their non-living assets (capital). To test the commercial value of Living Asset Stewardship (LAS), he constructed the Global Living Assets Management Performance (LAMP) Index ®, and compared its performance over 10 years from 1995 with Standard and Poor’s 500 Index and the Morgan and Stanley Capital International (MSCI) Index. He selected 60 global companies according to their commitment to LAS relative to their industry peers. The annualised returns over 10 years were LAMP: 17.37%, S&P 500: 9.07%, MSCI World: 7.04%.

Why do I use this blog space to regurgitate figures like this? Because it’s time for us to realise that what might look radical, even soft and idealistic, is actually good business sense. Which doesn’t mean it should be the primary reason the look after people and the environment, but the argument that says people are not resources, and that business has a responsibility to care for the environment, are not the quaint thinking of leaders on the margin.

I resonate with what Jay describes as the two fundamental truths of Living Asset Stewardship. (i) Profit can only arise from life. Economic systems are sub-systems of biological ones. (ii) In a healthy world, profit must serve life.

Ergo’s approach to business is based on Living Asset Stewardship. How is this different from a traditional way of thinking about business? I include a table from Jay’s book for your interest and musing. (Note the last line - that’s mine!)

March 3rd is a massive day. Today is the 2nd anniversary of a tragic event that took the lives of the parents of a dear friend of Maria’s (my partner). Last weekend, a member of our family collapsed on a basketball court, and save for the good fortune of having paramedics within minutes, we would have lost him. This afternoon he has open heart surgery, he is 25 years old. In a nearby hospital, also this afternoon, my friend and fellow Ergo director Derek, and his wife Caroline will welcome their 5th child into the world. Little wonder I find myself thinking about life and mortality this morning.

Death, serious illness and new-birth tend to focus the attention on what matters most. I remember visiting some friends in hospital after they’d had their first child. As Jane looked out the window at the people heading off to work and going about their regular days, she wanted to lean out and yell at them, “How dare you go to work as normal, I’ve just had a baby! (the world has changed)”.

So if things like this focus our attention on what matters, we would do well to retain the focus. Last week I mused about future trends, but the stuff that really matters tends to stay constant. In the scheme of things, technology and social evolutions hardly register on the scale.

I’ve been thinking about happiness. Most serious discussions about things that matter I’ve been involved in usually include lofty values like peace and justice. Absolutely. But what about happiness? Happiness sounds a bit light and fluffy. But I’m going to stick up my hand and say, “I want to be happy.’ At the end of the day, whatever else is going on, I want to be happy.

Now, I’m not talking about the ‘smile and everything will be OK’ approach to life. It’s a kind of deep happiness! I’m sure the peculiarities of personality and life circumstances make it different for different people, but for me, I’d say the foundations for happiness include:

• 1. doing enjoyable things with people who love me and who I love
• 2. inner peace: is my conscience clear, am I being true to my understanding of truth & goodness?

So, what’s this got to do with business. Everything. Because there is no business without people. Sometimes our behaviour suggests that the most important thing in life is our work. Not so. I can’t remember a single conversation with someone who says they regret the time they spend cultivating relationships and having good times with their loved ones and wished they had spent more time at the office.

The paradox is that when we invest in doing good stuff with our loved ones and commit to going to sleep each night with a clear conscience, our lives become richer and our work reaps the benefits. As I heard a prominent company CEO say, ‘the problem is not work life balance, the problem is that too many people don’t have a life.’

There are two proverbial realities to keep in tension. The first is to be wise, to invest in the future. The second is that today is all we’ve got - it invites us to live it as if it is our last. It’s not about a balance between these. Both are always fully formative.

So, today is a massive day. Full of life and death. I can’t do much about the later. I can do heaps about the former.