Lucy Bradshaw is a Senior VP at Electronic Arts. Maybe you haven’t heard of Lucy, but you’ve definitely heard of the games she’s behind: The Sims and Spore. Last November, Fast Company ran a great interview with her that is really inspiring. When you listen to her speak, you can feel the love she has for the product she develops and the passion she has for doing it in a playful, collaborative way.

Here are some of the key take-away points from Lucy’s interview:  Read the rest of this post

Here’s a quiz for you. Which of these two teams succeeded in making history and being extremely innovative in the process?

The A Team
• Budget: $2,000,000 in grant money.*
• Project Manager: A world renowned scientist and Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute.
• Team members: The best scientists money could buy.
• Subject matter expertise: Years of scale model experience.
• Industry connections: Extremely well connected.
• Publicity behind the project: Unprecedented.  Read the rest of this post

Why do you stay at your job? Is it because of what you give or because of what you get?  I think that’s a very important question to answer for yourself. And I think organizations need to understand how their employees answer this question as well.  A recent Gallup Management Journal survey indicated that only 29% of U.S. employees are actively engaged.  Actively engaged employees have a passion about what they do and feel a strong bond between themselves and their organization.  In a word, they stay at their jobs because of what they give. The other 71% of workers that are either disengaged or actively disengaged.  They come to work every day for the paycheck and have no passion about their work.  These are the folks who come to work because of what they get…a paycheck, benefits, and job security.  Read the rest of this post

Shortly after publishing yesteday’s post (Talk About the Passion), a close friend of mine sent me a link to Holstee’s site. Holstee is a design group who’s tagline is “Wear Your Passion”. What was interesting is that they have published what they call The Holstee Manifesto.  It’s really a manifesto about life and passion.  It’s especially relevant since another friend of mine is going through a life changing moment at her current job and sent me an email this morning in which she said “I just need to love what I do again, because right now my daily work is becoming soul crushing.” Nobody should have to feel that way on a daily basis and you have the power to change it whenever you want to.

So, in light of yesterday’s post and my friend’s email this morning, I thought this was worth sharing. It has great advice for anyone doing some soul searching and trying to figure out what’s important in life. Some of my favorite lines from the manifesto:

1. If you don’t like something, change it.
2. If you don’t like your job, quit.
3. Ask the next person you see what their passion is and share your inspiring dream with them.
4. Life is about the people you meet, and the things you create with them so go out and start creating.
5. Live your dream, and wear your passion.

I hope you find this manifesto as interesting and inspiring as I did.  Here it is in all it’s simple glory:

 Read the rest of this post