Image by Trekky0623 (Wikimedia Commons)
I’ve been reading Arie de Geus’ The Living Company: habits for survival in a turbulent business environment. It’s somewhat tangential to my role at the Academy, but nevertheless contains some great metaphors and insights.
Arie de Geus spent most of his career working for Shell, the oil company. During his time there, Shell commissioned a study about what makes a long-lived and prosperous organization. They found the following were true of the longest-lived organizations:
- Sensitivity to the environment – this represents an organization’s ability to learn and adapt.
- Cohesion and identity – aspects of a organizations innate ability to build a community and persona for itself.
- Tolerance – de Geus’ term, but actually as much to do with decentralization. Both are symptoms of a company’s awareness of its ecology and its ability to constructive relationships with other entities (within and outside itself)
- Conservative financing – this enables an organization to govern its own growth and evolution effectively
To sum this up, de Geus talks about organizations being ‘living organisms’:
Like all organisms, the living company exists primarily for its own survival and improvement: to fulfil its potential and to become as great as it can be. (p.11)
In terms of the relationship of the above to educational institutions, although they are all (theoretically) applicable, the one most applicable to my mind is cohesion and identity. It’s really important for educational institutions to build a culture of inclusion and achievement as this helps towards both implicit and explicit reasons for their existence.
What would you add to the above list? Would you take anything away? 🙂
cc-by malias
Seeing as this blog recently featured in The Top 50 Productivity Blogs (yeah, yeah) I’d better get posting a few more productivity hints and tips!
I first came across the idea of a ‘caffeine nap’ on Lifehacker a couple of years ago. The premise is simple:
- Drink a cup of coffee (‘the caffeine has to travel through your gastro-intestinal tract, giving you time to nap before it kicks in.’)
- Doze (‘you’ll get what’s known as effective microsleep, or momentary lapses of wakefulness.’)
- Wake up after 15 minutes (any longer and your brain’s prefrontal cortex – used for judgement, etc. – will ‘spin down’ and can take 30 mins to reboot)
The caffeine nap works by you using the time that it takes the caffeine to be absorbed into your bloodstream to nap. This ‘helps clear your system of adenosine, a chemical which makes you sleepy.’ (according to this source)
Scientific credence has been given to the caffeine nap through research done at the Sleep Research Laboratory at Loughborough University. Their study, inventively-titled Suppression of sleepiness in drivers: combination of caffeine with a short nap found that the mid-afternoon ‘sleepiness peak’
…was significantly reduced by caffeine and eliminated by the combined treatment, which reduced incidents to 9% of placebo levels versus 34% of placebo levels for caffeine alone.
I’ve found the caffeine nap to be a really effective technique to use when I come home from work to be more productive in the evenings. Coupled with the (Brian Eno-authored) Bloom iPhone app. it’s a winner! 😀
You can find a bit more about caffeine naps in Wikipedia’s more general section on Power naps and more about the wonders of caffeine can be found at the Coffee FAQ.
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