So the Post Office has announced some major changes to fight off the billions of dollars of debt they’ve accumulated doing business.  The three biggest changes are laying off about 28,000 workers, raising the price of stamps by a penny and making sure your first class mail takes longer to get to it’s destination. Now look, I admit I’m not an MBA.  I’m not a CEO of a fortune 50 company.  I haven’t even slept at a Holiday Inn Express recently.  And here at Meaning ...

One of the world’s most famous quotes is: “May you live in interesting times.”  It’s not meant as a good thing. The irony is, everyone has always lived in interesting times.  The world is in a constant state of change.  That’s no more true today, then it was 100 or 1000 years ago.  What is different is the speed of that change.  It took hundreds of years for society to go from using polished bronze to silver backed glass to create something you and I use every ...

Sometimes the way to solve a problem isn’t what you’d expect.  In today’s culture, we’re often told that the solution to conflict is to focus on what the other person wants – and then to do that.  It’s all about listening to someone’s feelings (which, we’re told, are just as valid as yours.) If you can just empathize enough, if you can put yourself in their shoes, then you can fix the problem. And while there’s certainly a place for that type of thinking and action, conflict is ...

There’s an interesting article on The Web Worker Daily about employees that work remotely verse those that work on site.  Not surprisingly those that work together have closer relationships with one another than they do with people working remotely. (You’d expect that if you see people regularly you’ll form stronger relationships than people you don’t see regularly.) The technical term for this is “in group” vs “out group”. In Group’s experience stronger community, more sharing, they get along better, and they have more access to resources, cooperation, and ...

Every one of us has ideas about how things are “supposed to work.”  These views impact marriages, raising kids, how we feel about our jobs and even whether we like movies or politicians.  As important as these views are to our lives, we spend very little time thinking about how they form. Take your own work for a moment.  Have you ever wondered why your work email can’t be as functional as your Gmail account?  Or why your company’s website search doesn’t work like Google?  Or maybe you ...

Why is our first reaction to reach for the lawyers? If you haven’t heard, the Apple / Google wars heat up.  Both of these companies are poised to become huge players in the emerging “super phone” market.  Which means that billions, if not trillions, of dollars are at stake.  This is why Apple’s lobbing of legal grenades is so important.  With filings targeted at Google’s phones (specifically the HTC models), Apple is saying they won’t ...

The last year has been particularly hard on people.  The economy has been stagnant at best, and in a free fall at worst.  Now there's rumors of a recovery under way.  I don't know if that's true or not.  That's for economists to debate. But for the people directly impacted by the economy this has been a painful time.  Downsizing often brings health problems (headaches, physical illness, sleeping ...