Rethink What Matters

Hello, everybody. Welcome to rethink what matters. The podcast dedicated helping you improve your business performance. Your well-being, happiness, and the planet, one behavior at a time. I'm your host, Paul Freudenberg from Awardaroo And this is episode zero.

It's a six minute introduction to what these podcasts are gonna be all about. Just enough, I hope that you'll be interested to want to learn more.

In order to be happier, healthier, and lead more profitable businesses, there are three beliefs we need to change. And it's those three beliefs that we will be addressing in the first podcast.

There has perhaps never been a bigger need for this podcast for both individuals and businesses alike.

The climate is warming up. Mental health issues are on the increase. Business productivity hasn't recovered since two thousand and eight. We're just coming out of the pandemic only to go straight into a cost of living challenge. That affects both individuals and businesses alike.

At a Awardaroo, we believe that nobody wins unless everybody wins. And the vision of Awardaroo is to create a happier healthier, more equal humanity on a peaceful planet that endures.

And this vision today is anything but guaranteed We need to be happier with improved well-being, personal, professional, and business productivity to get through these challenges and to come out stronger.

I want to stress that these podcasts that will come out every Thursday will be positive. They will have actions and ideas we can all consider in order to be happier, healthier, and create a better world and more profitable businesses.

But in this podcast, podcast zero I need to set the context for the series that will follow.

You see, there is a single theme that runs through low productivity, unhappiness, poor mental health, and well-being. And that is we have all become too transactional.

We've lost sight of what really matters to us.

This problem has its roots in the early industrial revolution when workers were treated only as an extension of the machines that they operated, who are only tasked with producing more and more widgets, where the only model that existed for managing a large number of people came from the military, very hierarchical, very disciplined.

And if you stepped out of line, you were likely to get shot or court marshaled. There were three influential people in the twentieth century who really set the tone for how business was done. Naughton Friedman, who said the sole purpose of business was to create a profit. Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose ideas around scientific management, meant that people were treated like the widgets they made, and b f skinner whose ideas on behaviorism said that the only effective way to motivate people was with carrots and sticks.

And ever since their time, people have known there's a better way, but that way worked. Created improved living standards for all. Abject poverty has all but been wiped out, but it's not working anymore. The hidden costs that approach on people, the planet, and our productivity and profits are becoming all too obvious for all to see.

Impact of the planet and people is recognized by governments and large corporations alike. But whilst the people are well meaning, the systems we've created, say quarterly business cycles, annual reports, five year plans, four and five year election cycles keeps us locked into the old short term thinking. Planning and problems.

Our planning, our visions, our goal setting needs to be in terms of decades and centuries, not months.

So for example, in twenty fifteen, United Nations, that's one hundred and ninety three countries agreed to seventeen sustainable development goals. Completed by two thousand and thirty.

In Davos, in twenty twenty, a hundred and twenty countries, a major corporation is called for a better kind of capitalism. Acknowledge that companies must benefit all stakeholders, not just shareholders and profitability.

In twenty nineteen, the American business roundtable made up of a hundred and eighty one CEOs committed to lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders.

Again, not just the shareholders and profit. And in twenty twenty one, the una, the United Nations Climate Conference twenty six in Glasgow restated its commitment to helping to achieve net zero.

Why then are all these, countries and big public corporations now suddenly recognizing the importance of the planet and people and not just profits?

Well, if you've seen the twenty twenty one film, don't look up with Leonardo Decaprio and others, you'll notice a film about a comet heading towards the planet, planet Earth, and the chaos that ensues.

Now that comment is clearly a metaphor, but for what, for me, it's our economic system that uses up on natural resources, destroys our environment, exacerbates mental illness harms families community and society.

So just to revisit the goals of this podcast to help improve happiness, health, and well-being, improve business performance, and create a better planet. Again, to do this, we have to reach think what matters. And that's what this podcast is all about.

There'll be interviews across a wide range of subjects some people, stories, anecdotes, and case studies of things that are working that you can use in your life and business.

I'd love to hear from you, with any ideas you have that you'd like me to include please just email me at paul at awarderoo dot co dot uk.

And as you've listened this far, thanks for listening, and here's a bonus.

The marshmallow experiment of nineteen seventy two. I'm paraphrasing this slightly, but basically they put a marshmallow in front of a number of small children.

And said they could eat it now, or if they waited, they could have two later when the researchers return.

Now some kids waited for the second marshmallow, others, eighteen straight away. And the researchers followed up then some years later, and found that those who waited had better life outcomes in terms of grade school, health, and well-being.

So discipline, self control, and vision all play a key role in helping us to be happier, healthier, and wealthier.

I can't wait to get started and help, close the gap between where we are today and where we need to be. But, okay, now I need to go. And figure out how to upload this and make a podcast page.

Mhmm. Make this live.