Keep up the great work! :)

I will still say “no” to throughout 2010, despite the more popular web marketing “wisdom” we are bombarded with: I will not be doing any email newsletters over and above, or different from the ways you can now get my publishing alerts directly into your inbox: Via Feedburner subscriptions to either this blog, Talking Story (click here), or if you want even more, my Tumblr, Ho‘ohana Aloha (click here).

“Soft and fuzzy” has taken a severe hit with our recent economic tumbles. You know what I mean; those workplace humanity concepts which fall beyond the bottom line. We were doing fairly well working on them for a while, and our very rational, genuine selves will speak up and say, “Oh, don’t worry, we haven’t given up on that stuff. But you do understand we have to get the basics back first…”

Just great. A “yeah, but” from our emotional intelligence.

As a Talking Story reader, you are aware of my answer. In the financial literacy which is as real as it gets, hard, soft, and everything inbetween, wealth is a value. No matter what goes on in our world, and no matter what factors are at play at any given time, our values are “hard concepts” in my mind: They will always be foundational to why we care, why we bother when we keep trying, and how we go about surviving.

I gave a 20-minute talk about this to an audience of association executives in New York City last week, and I was asked if I would share the transcript of my speech for their future reference. Here it is, for I thought you might enjoy it too, as a good summary of many of the conversations we have had here. My hope, is that you will have it be a mirror image of the business model you give your attentions to today, for you and I both know this to be true: We humans, at our rock-hard, real-as-it-gets core, are “soft and fuzzy” in the true intelligence which matters to us. Task at hand, is getting that to match up to the way we work — from now on.

Continued at… Values are the Bedrock of Hard Reality, a post I suspect will be one of those notable markers for us here. It is also a good introduction if you are newly meeting me…

I love the whole notion of “game-changing,” don’t you?