Ever since the 1980s, there has been an increasing amount of media coverage on stress-related topics. For decades, scientists, researchers, and doctors have been investigating how the human body responds to stress, and whether it is possible for some people to become addicted to stress. While there are no hard figures to reveal how…

Almost everyone who is interested in life hacks has come across the concept of minimalism at some point. Living with less means you have less clutter in your life, which always helps with productivity. One subset of the minimalist movement is 100-item Minimalism, where people make a commitment to live with 100 items or…

Today is Columbus Day in the USA and Thanksgiving in Canada. We have commemorative days for famous people, famous events and (in many parts of the world) religious festivals. I want to suggest that you establish a special day specially for yourself: for allowing yourself time and space to be who you are—and to look…

Ancient Zen masters said “When hungry eat, when tired sleep.” Modern societies have the first part down pat since the majority of people in western countries are overweight. These busy people seem to have missed something in the translation of the sleep part. This carries over to fitness where many are too tired or say…

Marcus Vorwaller at the Best Tool For The Job blog has finished his series on ways to improve the quality of your life. The titles themselves give you enough to think about. 1. Think daily. Meditate. Call it what you will but spend time each day alone with your thoughts. This surely isn’t the…

After the election last week in the United States, change is a hot topic, but it isn’t political change that I have been thinking about recently. It’s how organizations and their leaders cope—or, more often, fail to cope too well—with the need for changes in business practices to promote growth and foster creativity. It’s a truism…

As I look back at this week’s postings on Slow Leadership, I notice that most of them were concerned with helping people stop wasting their time and energy on fruitless endeavors. Take the first post, entitled: To Succeed, First Forget About Leadership Technique. In it, I argued that belief that success—in just about any…

I’ve been thinking and writing quite a lot this week about Hamburger Management: the type of management approach that is based on always doing whatever is quickest, simplest and (above all) cheapest. Hamburger Managers provide the kind of leadership that is best described as: “Never mind the quality, look how fast it goes and how…

When you write an article on a topic, it’s traditional to start with the problem, explain the causes next, then move into offering a solution. On the Slow Leadership site this week, I took things more or less in the opposite order, starting on Monday with part of the solution, giving my views on…

We live in world full of pressures to conform: to believe what others tell us is true, to toe the line, to accept the values of those in positions of power, and to follow conventional, approved paths. That’s the way to get on in life and business, we are told. You need to fit in…

You’re driving along the freeway. The traffic is heavy and the weather is bad; there’s water on the road and occasional patches of ice. You’re already late for an appointment and you’re worrying that your boss is going to find out and get mad at you, so you’re driving way too fast for the conditions…

Trust in other people is one of the foundations for creating a civilized working environment. Many managers are overworked primarily because of a lack of trust. They take on too much themselves, because they don’t trust their subordinates to do the work properly. They cannot allocate enough time to their own work, because they don’t…

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about why people do things, and what they have in mind when they ask others to act in a particular way. It’s common to find that what people say is the reasoning behind their actions or requests isn’t the real motivation for either. I may do or say…

When people speak about the soul — outside of a purely religious context — they’re usually referring to the qualities of something (or someone) that they see as fundamental to its identity. The word “soul” is shorthand for the innermost, truest or most obviously unique nature of whatever or whoever they are referring to. Used in…

This week, I’ve been thinking a great deal about what counts as a “civilized” corporate and workplace culture. That’s because I’m deep into the editing process with my new book, Slow Leadership: How to Civilize Your Workplace, which will be published this Fall. The more I think about it, the more is seems to me that much of corporate America — much of the Western corporate world, if it comes to that — has taken a large step backwards in recent years in providing truly civilized working conditions.