The Evolution of High Performance Organizations. Businesses that thrive in the coming decades will excel in three essential capabilities: efficiency, effectiveness and resilience. Efficiency is a measure of the cost of executing a logical process. Effectiveness is a measure of the degree to which you are producing the results you want. Resilience is a measure of your ability to meet any and all challenges successfully, to thrive whenever possible and to survive all challenges.

The seductive mind is the mind that always wants to race ahead and fill you with its thoughts, or wants to cut other people off to make your point without listening to theirs. I call it the seductive mind because those thoughts are so compelling. Have you ever been in a meeting when someone was talking, and suddenly you realize you’d become completely distracted by your thoughts and entirely missed what was being said? That’s the seductive mind.

Physical sensations, emotions and thoughts can pull us away from this stillness. Those sensations, emotions and thoughts are like stones thrown into a still pool of water. They create disturbances that can ripple out, interfere with one another and reinforce one another. These may lead to action, but it is inefficient at best, destructive at worst. Or, sensations, emotions and thoughts can be like the vibrations created on a fine musical instrument. They harmonize and make music.

Mathematicians invent machines all the time – it’s part of their work. But most people don’t know that, because mathematicians don’t call them machines; they call them “functions”. Mathematicians are really good at creating language that is accurate and meaningful for them, even though it’s confusing for the rest of us. A function in math is just a machine that turns one thing into something else.

Conflict – it’s a word that crops up in conversations all the time. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with an organization where conflict – and it’s mishandling – haven’t been a topic of concern. It’s part of life; you can’t avoid it, because it’s part of the human condition…

When you aren’t sure how to get from one place to another, you’re likely to pull out a GPS device, plug in the address you’re looking for, and voilà! the device starts telling you where to go. GPS systems can do that because they have maps with three critical sets…

Breathing