Ted Tuesday: Writing My Wrongs: Shaka Senghor at TedX Midwest

 "Making the best out of a bad situation, Shaka offers sobering firsthand accounts of redemption, the power of hope and how literature changed his life.

Good Morning Folks,

At FSO, we believe in second chances and have some great stories to boast about of our own. Because anyone with >>skip, >>fire and >>twinkle that is willing to learn, apply themselves and grow, has the right to become all they can be.

That's why I love my Ted selection for you today. WOW! Here is powerful testimony of a realistic examination of life in the world of urban inner city America. Shaka Senghor needs to be on every talk show, every news stations, and should be paid handsomely to tell story. What an upside down world we live in.

In 1991, Shaka Senghor shot and killed a man. He was, he says, "a drug dealer with a quick temper and a semi-automatic pistol." Jailed for second degree murder, that could very well have been the end of the story. But it wasn't. Instead, it was the beginning of a years-long journey to redemption, one with humbling and sobering lessons for us all.

Using literature as a lifeline, Shaka Senghor escaped a cycle of prison and desperation. Now his story kindles hope in those who have little.

At the age of 19, Shaka Senghor went to prison fuming with anger and despair. Senghor was a drug dealer in Detroit, and one night, he shot and killed a man who showed up on his doorstep. While serving his sentence for second-degree murder, Senghor discovered redemption and responsibility through literature -- starting with The Autobiography of Malcolm X -- and through his own writing.

Upon his release at the age of 38, Senghor reached out to young men following his same troubled path, and published Live in Peace as part of an outreach program bringing hope to kids in Detroit and across the Midwest.

Shaka Senghor's story of redemption has inspired young adults at high schools and universities across the nation. While serving 19 years in prison, Senghor discovered his love for writing. He has written six books, including a memoir about his life in prison, Writing My Wrongs. In 2012, Senghor's Live in Peace Digital and Literary Arts Project won a Black Male Engagement Leadership Award from the Knight Foundation in partnership with the Open Society Foundation's Campaign for Black Male Achievement. Senghor has also recently been named a Director's Fellow at MIT for his work.

Join nearly a million others and Have a look at....

Well done Shaka I love your forward thinking. 

How lucky are we to be able be given new chances to improve ourselves, improve the way we serve our clients, improve the way we work with our staff, as well as to improve the way these opportunities are spread among all levels of employment at FSO. This is important. 

Because great companies make sure that opportunities are available to all levels and not only to a select few. No other outsourcing company does this to their staff and I am a living proof, because I’ve been in the business since the dinosaurs roamed.

Let's all go make things happen today. I look forward to seeing you soon.

Love Life!

Mitchell D. Weiner

Chief Happiness Officer  

Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.  


About FSO Onsite Outsourcing
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies for the second consecutive year, and lead by industry pioneer, Mitch Weiner, FSO's growth and success can be attributed to making a positive and powerful impact on their clients' bottom lines, as well as their employees' careers and lives.

Ted Tuesday: The Emerging Work World in the Participation Age | Chuck Blakeman | TEDxMileHigh

In this funny and insightful talk, Chuck Blakeman explores the hallmarks of the Participation Age (a workforce who wants to Make both Money and Meaning at work)— and its attraction to the next generations of stakeholders and leaders.

Good Morning Folks,

What does it mean to be a company that has joined the Participation Age? How does this new business perspective affect the bottom line? In this funny and insightful talk, Chuck Blakeman explores the hallmarks of the Participation Age, and their attraction to the next generations of stakeholders and leaders.

Says Chuck in a piece he penned for INC, "We are living at the intersection of two opposing work worlds, The Industrial Age, which is still strangely dominant in the front office of most companies. And the Participation Age, which is emerging as the new standard for how we work."

"In the production area, we have replaced Industrial Age assembly lines and smokestacks with things like nanotechnology and clean rooms. But the front office looks pretty much the same way it did a hundred years ago, with managers in ties making all the decisions. These Industrial Age management practices, which recreated humans as extensions of machines, are colliding with the emerging Participation Age workforce that wants to Make Meaning at work.

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.

Enjoy!



Well done Chuck I always love your articles and your forward thinking. 

Let's all go make things happen today. I look forward to seeing you soon.

Love Life!

Mitchell D. Weiner

Chief Happiness Officer  

Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form.TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE. 

About FSO Onsite Outsourcing
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies for the second consecutive year, and lead by industry pioneer, Mitch Weiner, FSO's growth and success can be attributed to making a positive and powerful impact on their clients' bottom lines, as well as their employees' careers and lives.

Ted Tuesday: Flow, The Secret to Happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“What makes us really happy?” He refers to the research that money can not make us happy and looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of “flow.

Good Morning Folks,

Leave it to your Chief Happiness officer to for you an inspiring keynote about Happiness that four million people have already seen and raved about, and I bet you haven't.

So appropriate to the peace and serenity I find when I visit Napa for a few days as I write from here now. I always leave Napa and return to the City with my own "flow" in check.

Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. A leading researcher in positive psychology, he has devoted his life to studying what makes people truly happy: “When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.” He is the architect of the notion of “flow”– the creative moment when a person is completely involved in an activity for its own sake.

In this TEDx Talk Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, “What makes us really happy?” He refers to the research that money can not make us happy and looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of “flow.”



He also refers to:

• how the nervous system is unable to process more than approximately 110bits of information per second, and
• difference examples of flow from a figure skater, a business man, Anita Roddick (the Body Shop) and Masaru Ibuka (Sony).
• The presentation is summed up on the slide (at 14mins), called How does it feel to be in flow?

Completely involved in what you are doing – focused, concentrated,

• A sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality,
• Greater inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done and how well we are doing,
• Knowing that the activity is doable – that our skills are adequate to the task,
• A sense of serenity – no worries about oneself and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego,
• Timelessness – thoroughly focused on the present, hours seem to pass by in minutes, and
• Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.

If you are interested in his work, his books include Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (Masterminds Series), and Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.

Thanks to Habits For Well Being for their inspirations preparing this post, to TED and of course to you for listening.

Let's all go make things happen today. I look forward to seeing you soon.

Love Life!

Mitchell D. Weiner

Chief Happiness Officer  

Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form.TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE. 

About FSO Onsite Outsourcing
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies for the second consecutive year, and lead by industry pioneer, Mitch Weiner, FSO's growth and success can be attributed to making a positive and powerful impact on their clients' bottom lines, as well as their employees' careers and lives.

Ted Tuesday: The Rise Of The Social Employee: Mark Burgess at TEDxNavesink

"Employees, through social media, are changing how companies market to, and engage with, customers and prospects. With the transparency and opportunity for personal connections that social media offers, pushing fabricated, unauthentic sales pitches doesn’t work anymore. Instead, we are witnessing the rise of the social employee who creates a win/win proposition by leveraging their personal brands to build trust and increase the digital “surface area” of the brands for which they work."

Good Morning Folks,

Last night a large group of FSO's finest spent three hours circling manhattan on a yacht to celebrate our success, our growth, and future goals. It was a blast and I look forward to soon sharing the photos of all the fun and dancing shoes :-).

Today, however, I am going to focus on a topic of paramount importance in our company and if not your company now, it will be coming sooner rather than later. It's a revolution that begins with every employee… starting with YOU.

A book by today's guest speaker, College of Business Administration professor Mark Burgess explores how employees can serve as brand ambassadors.

In 2010, Southwest airlines removed director Kevin Smith from one of its planes before takeoff, saying he violated the company’s “Customer of Size” policy. Offended, Smith took to Twitter, excoriating the airline in a series of tweets to his many followers. The potential public relations disaster rippled across the Internet, and as control over the incident began to spiral away, the airline had to react in real time.

Enter the social employee. Conceived by College of Business Administration professor Mark Burgess and his wife and business partner, Cheryl, the social employee serves as the brand’s ambassador, its most authentic connection to consumers in the social media sphere, where the bottom line goes beyond buying and selling toward a transparent dialogue of values.

“People tend to believe in the voice of an employee more than the voice of an ad, which can be intrusive and less valuable,” Burgess says. “They want to hear from employees. People respect and engage with those voices.”

Southwest responded to Smith with tweets of its own, followed by a blog post that tried to soothe Smith and put out the fire. Burgess, who helped develop courses in the CBA that shifted emphasis to the growing field of digital marketing, commends the transparency of the response (even if Smith wasn’t gratified) in the 2014 book he and Cheryl wrote together, The Social Employee (McGraw-Hill). Drawing on success stories from Southwest, IBM, Dell and other companies, the book gives real-life examples of how companies empower employees to become brand ambassadors through social media.

“We coined a phrase and feel like we’re leading a movement,” Burgess says. “More and more companies are all using the same term.”

“Marketing is always about trying to sell something, but the difference is how you do it,” Burgess says. “More and more, people are ignoring TV ads. What’s relevant is your own network, and all of this is driven by social conversation.”

Burgess cites a study that concluded brands are central to about 40 percent of conversations on social media. “If you don’t have a strategy, you’re going to miss being a part of those conversations,” he says, adding that employees are an obvious if traditionally underused channel to tell a brand’s story and publicly share a company’s culture. “Trained and inspired around the power of a brand, employees can engage within their own network about it,” he says.

A sound social media policy and well-trained employees can help avert that result, Burgess says. Aside from establishing useful guidelines, brands can foster success by identifying the employees who inherently feel passionate enough about the company’s brand to become its ambassadors. “You want employees to work within their comfort zone,” Burgess says, so if they favor Twitter over Facebook, don’t force them to use Facebook.

The upshot for employees, Burgess says, is that the work also helps them grow their network and burnish their personal brand. “It’s a classic win-win situation,” he says. “If you’re actively engaged, you’re benefiting the brand you work for today, but you’re also building your own brand.”

The activity is far from onerous for the so-called digital natives who take social media as a fact of life.

As more companies adopt the social employee model, the next leap will be to the social executive, says Burgess, who equates the role to that of the player-coach, calling in plays while partaking in the game as well. “At some point it’s almost going to be a requirement that you have to be out there,” he says. “And if you’re an executive who can’t say something about your brand in 140 characters, you’re in the wrong business.”

In this talk, Mark Burgess brings to our attention how employees, through social media, are changing how companies market to, and engage with, customers and prospects. With the transparency and opportunity for personal connections that social media offers, pushing fabricated, unauthentic sales pitches doesn’t work anymore. Instead, we are witnessing the rise of the social employee who creates a win/win proposition by leveraging their personal brands to build trust and increase the digital “surface area” of the brands for which they work. The result is nothing short of a revolution that touches every company and relationship around us. Enjoy.


FSO is a force to be reckoned with; our competition is on the run. They know they cannot compete with us and our Personal, Passionate and Productive approach we take in everything we do. 

Our client’s rave about the work we do for them, we hear it from them every day!  

We have a clear path in front of us; it is ours for the taking.  

We have worked hard to get here, we should all be proud of what we have accomplished, but it’s not over!  

To continue the astonishing success I am committed to building a team of Rock Stars, each with the specific purpose to drive new opportunities for FSO! The social employee is on the rise right here.

Let's all go make things happen today. I look forward to seeing you soon.

Love Life!

Mitchell D. Weiner

Chief Happiness Officer  

Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form.TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE. 

About FSO Onsite Outsourcing
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies for the second consecutive year, and lead by industry pioneer, Mitch Weiner, FSO's growth and success can be attributed to making a positive and powerful impact on their clients' bottom lines, as well as their employees' careers and lives.