Two Birds, One Stone

I attended a great Webinar the other day, thanks to the fine folks at Rypple, by Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre hotels. He provided a great framework for thinking about motivation based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, arguing that once the basic human needs (job) and the sense of belonging (career) are met, an individual can then ascend to the “PEAK” of self-actualization (calling). The groundwork to allow this to happen is corporate culture and not just simple tactical things like “casual Fridays” or “social clubs”. It requires a deeper grain of culture that every person in the organization embodies and can be drawn out an nurtured to encourage a connection with purpose… a “calling” as Chip calls it. A lot of what Chip talked about reflects my own beliefs and goals of creating a strong culture here at MemoryLeaf. It’s tough to do though, and I think that it can be impossible to try and “engineer”. And it shouldn’t really be engineered… the best I can hope is to help shape the organic growth of our team. A broader snapshop of the webinar is here: http://blog.rypple.com/2011/03/top-tips-from-chip-conley/ or you can watch the whole thing below.