This blog will help you flourish.
With a nod to Martin Seligman,* I introduce you to my new blog, dedicated to helping you and the organization you lead flourish.
In the last couple years, I’ve noticed that this word, “flourish,” keeps popping up in our culture archetypally, perhaps beckoning us out of the Great Recession and recent world turmoil and towards an easier, simpler, happier, more enjoyable life. It's the antidote to the volatility many experience through the accelerated change present in our world.
Seligman, of course, published his book, Flourish, around this time and identifies five “endeavors” we may choose to pursue:
- Positive emotion
- Engagement
- Good relationships
- Meaning
- Accomplishment or achievement
He urges each of us in the free world to choose this approach, PERMA for short. (Watch this short talk to learn more.)
Flourishing Organizations
Not surprisingly an organization that flourishes shares many of the same characteristics. Here are my observations:
Value
Meaning
Engagement
Economic vitality
Relationships
Positive culture
Strategy
An organization that flourishes has a clear, ambitious, practical strategy designed to guide its team into the future.
That's it: VMEERPS. Certainly not as aesthetically pleasing an acronym as Seligman's PERMA, I realize. But it is that simple. Perhaps not easy, but simple.
What You'll Find Here
My core value is about helping leaders design their futures so they and their organizations (nonprofits, associations, destinations, regions, or businesses) flourish. Through this blog, a complement to my blog on corporate sponsorship, SponsorshipStrategist.com, we'll explore ways organizations can:
- uncover and bring their organizational value to life,
- engage audiences in meaningful experiences,
- deliver messages and articulate value in compelling ways,
- generate new revenue by developing new value or existing value to new markets, and
- become cultures where innovation thrives and a flourishing future emerges.
I look forward to your comments and dialogue through the journey. A couple thoughts as we begin:
- I sincerely welcome your participation in the community I hope this blog will create.
- Feel free to post your comments; however, please note that I reserve the right to remove posts that are inappropriate or not in the spirit of this blog. That said, challenge, provocation, questioning are all welcome.
- Have fun and feel free to contact me with your suggestions, questions, or topic ideas.
Ready? Set? Flourish.
*Seligman opens his book, Flourish, with "This book will help you flourish," an uncomfortable promise for a scientist, he tells readers.