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“If you get the environment right, every single one of us has the capacity to do remarkable things.”

In this TED talk on Why good leaders make you feel safe, Simon Sinek distills some powerful ideas in just 12 minutes, principal among them, that you cannot control external variables affecting your business. The only variables you can are the conditions inside the organisation.

“If the conditions are wrong [the environment is such that people do not feel safe], we are forced to expend our own time and energy to protect ourselves from each other – and that inherently weakens the organisation.”

Watch here:

Here’s a great mantra courtesy of Paul Akers at Fastcap LLC for a culture dedicated to continuous improvement:

“Leave everything better than you find it”

More of Paul in lean loo action below and on his website :

“If the why is big enough, the how becomes easy.”

This is from a Quora answer by Rizwan Asseem on reasons why people fail in their promises to themselves, but the sentiment is equally applicable to generating drive in any endeavour.

Rizwan makes the case that people fail to take steps towards getting things done not because there was anything wrong in their planning, but because they haven’t connected their results to ‘Why you want to achieve them’. If the Why isn’t powerful enough it’s too easy for other stuff to get in the way, to appear more important.

His answer? Find bigger reasons why you want to do something. The minute you find a bigger reason to do the things that you want to do, actually doing them will become so much easier.

Do it for love, not prestige, do it for the meaning, not the metrics.

A person’s life is an accumulation of time – just one hour is equivalent to a person’s life. Employees provide their precious hours of life to the company, so we have to use it effectively, otherwise, we are wasting their life. – Eiji Toyoda (Chairman and Toyota luminary, credited with creating much of what we now consider ‘Lean’ approaches to production)