Michael's blog
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This week’s “Thrive Summit 2015” by Virgin Pulse had three great keynote speakers, the third of whom was Ann Rhoades, founder of People Ink and a former and present force at such people-focused enterprises as Southwest and JetBlue airlines.
She’s a pistol. One oft-offered piece of advice during her presentation was to send the resumes of employees who don’t fit the company culture to competitors, hoping they’ll get offers and go.
“Behavior happens when…” That’s how B.J. Fogg advises how to express the left side of his formula, B=mat, which I will get to in a moment. But what I noted was that he shared that guidance, and I wanted to follow it.
I’d bet that that happens not seldomly with him. He’s clearly a winning individual.
So: the formula. M denotes motivation, A denotes ability, and T is for trigger. What it means: Behavior happens when sufficient motivation and ability combine with a trigger. All three have to coincide exactly, he said; just a few seconds’ separation will make a difference.
One of the ideas popping out during Tuesday’s Thrive Summit in Boston was that sleep is important.
Duh.
OK, I dumbed that down a little for effect, but two speakers chose to use sleep to illustrate wellness, which I do think is indicative of its growing focus.
In this overpaced, overscheduled, over-expectational world, would you be willing to invest 30 minutes if you could gain a couple of hours of productivity?
That’s one of the questions Virgin Pulse CEO Chris Boyce posed during his main-stage address at his company’s Thrive Summit 2015 this morning. He was talking about exercise: 70 percent of people don’t get the recommended 30 minutes a day, and the lack leads to 23 percent decline in cognitive ability for the rest of the day, he said.
I'm writing and posting from "Thrive Summit 2015," hosted in Boston by Virgin Pulse. I hope to remember to add this disclosure to each of my posts, but in case not (and a faint attempt to cover me for social media), I want to disclose that a) I'm Virgin Pulse's guest at this event, having been granted a press pass, and b) this is, in part, a sales conference highlighting Virgin Pulse software. Nothing wrong with that, but still, it's good to remember, and to state it.
In the most recent post, we were enjoying author Andre Spicer’s interview with a very sympathetic editor at Harvard Business Review. Spicer is co-author of “The Wellness Syndrome,” a run-of-the-mill dog-bites-man tale that argues that corporate wellness programs not only don’t help, they harm.
I saved his last answer for this post. It is:
Academics Andre Spicer and Carl Cederstrom have made a splash with their book “The Wellness Syndrome,” which posits that corporate wellness programs not only aren’t good, they’re bad for health and morale.
Firebrand Al Lewis is relentlessly snide in his prosecution of corporate wellness in the public dock. His blog posts refer to the “self-described experts” of the “wellness ignorati” who produced a report he picks on, and then mocks a critic who says that calling people ignorant and liars is bullying.
Authors Al Lewis (left), Andre Spicer, and Carl Cederstrom have been getting lots of mileage tearing down the notion of corporate wellness. Having not heard enough in reply to balance their broadsides, I’m writing one.
From the folks at OpenReq, a look at wellness wellness-program incentives and perspectives for opposite sides of the looking glass.

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