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Consider that we live in a time where Instagram influencers or YouTubers (most with no technical skill, academic knowledge, or talent) have reached celebrity status and have accumulated significant wealth through their various platforms.

And many of their followers aspire to be like them.

And why not?

Well, for one reason, this celebrity status changes us for the worse.  Universally, this status requires a selfishness and a worldly focus for only gaining things –  money, power, and prestige.

Creativity might often be viewed more as an enjoyable jolt of insight than an effortful process, but, in fact, both insights and persistent effort can lead to good ideas.

If we prefer and expect easier insights, we will be less likely to struggle through an ideation process and discover our best ideas.  Thus, we will confuse difficulty for quality and stop when we should push on.

Conversational skills are essential for establishing connections, nurturing relationships, and achieving success at work.  In addition, good conversationalists show genuine concern for others through their tone of voice and body language.  

Learning to be a better conversationalist can help business leaders share information with colleagues, friends, and family members more effectively.

In the business world, manipulation is often referred to as a nudge. 

We all know that people are not fully rational.  Our physical or emotional environments influence people’s choices and behavior.  The arena of charity fundraising is a classic example of playing with our heartstrings to get us to donate more money than we might typically consider.  They use photos and graphic stories to “nudge” us to increase our giving.

Business leaders and entrepreneurs must apply nudges to get our customers to buy our products and services.  We need to use well-written ads, great graphics, and exceptional personal salesmanship to cause our potential buyers to select us over everyone else.

Most people tend to treat conversation like a competitive sport, in which the person who says the most, makes the cleverest point, persuades others of an opinion, or even speaks the longest and loudest is the winner. 

All of us fall into this trap.  We all find ourselves interrupting, speechifying, insisting, and coming up with witticisms – all to support our point of view or display our superior knowledge. 

If you stop and think about it, this approach is the opposite of the one we should take.  In most conversations, the person who speaks least benefits the most, and the person who speaks most benefits the least. 

Storytelling in business is telling a story rather than listing facts when communicating with current or potential customers.

All organizations feed on emotions.  Love, fear, and humor have all been recognized as playing an essential role in the proper functioning of the organization.  On the other hand, hope has been seen as part of the function of project teams (“I hope I can meet that deadline”), but it has never been seriously considered as a needed team emotion.

Until now.

Corporate purpose is once again in the news (it actually never left).

And not for how beneficial it is to corporate management, staff, shareholders, and stakeholders but because of how abused it is.

Consideration of ethics is the most important responsibility of business leaders and entrepreneurs today. We cannot rely on our own internal sense of right and wrong. Professional societies and larger organizations have taken the initiative and developed a starting point for business ethics. However, we all should look to Christian ethics as the foundation of all our personal and professional practices.

And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.