“Profit Is To Business as Oxygen Is To Life” on Helios Blog

Life

In our business culture today, we have a relentless focus towards more— buying more, selling more, having more. We’ve even codified this unending expectation into our work lives in the form of “quarterly returns.” The explicit and implicit expectation set upon our most public organizations is unending growth, quarter after quarter, year after year, forever and ever.

More, more, more.

But we live on a planet with finite resources. How is it we think infinite quarter-upon-quarter returns aren’t just possible, but are actually sustainable…?

There’s something deeply unhealthy about this, and we see it clearly in the biological world, because there IS something that provides unending growth and ceaseless consumption of resources: we call it cancer.

Probably not the example we want.

Maybe you’ve heard this analogy before…

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“The Dirty Secret Of Burnout” on Helios Blog

Life

Burnout at work is quite literally everywhere. Perhaps you read the recent article in The Washington Post, or saw how companies are adopting four-day workweeks to try to combat this problem, or checked out the piece in BuzzFeed about how Millennials are “the burnout generation.”

Or maybe you just looked in the mirror, or into the cubicle next to you.

Well, we believe burnout has a dirty secret… something hiding in plain sight. And it has to do with where it comes from — and how to fix it…

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I’m Back… And My TEDx Is Live!

Featured, Life

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“If you see me less, I’m doing more.”

Toward the beginning of this year, I saw the above quote on Instagram.

While I recognize the bold irony in this kind of statement being posted on a social network that was created to make people feel like they’re being seen more, it was resonant for me.

For many years, I was able to share a LOT online (reference my blog archive or writing portfolio), but over the last few years I simply haven’t. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t believe there are excuses or reasons, there are only priorities — and I’ve been doing my damndest to prioritize the right things… sometimes succeeding, and sometimes failing spectacularly.

Transforming our organization into Helios has been a big task — much bigger than I imagined. This brand feels so magnetic that it’s sparked a lot of re-thinking and re-building. The idea of heliotropism in work has completely infected the way I think and the way we work — and as such, it’s felt quite compulsory to re-engineer our product offerings accordingly as well, which is no small task with a growing organization.

(If you see me less, I’m doing more.)

I’ll talk more about how we’ve transformed our offerings another time; for now I just wanted to say hello and pen a bit of a re-entry!

My intention is to share fresh ideas with you on a much more regular basis moving forward. I’ll still be writing about the same things I have for many years (i.e. how to make work not suck), but in my last few years of non-sharing, I’ve been learning a LOT about how to put this into practice, so you’ll be seeing more of that.

For a long time I’ve believed work should be life-giving instead of life-sucking — we now know exactly HOW to do that, and I want to share those things with you.

Until then, please check out my TEDx!

It’s right here: joshallan.com/tedx — along with practical follow-up actions (a free downloadable FAQ, an Online Course you can take, etc.) that will show you exactly what to do next if you want to start implementing the ideas in the talk.

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