Link Love: SF Culture Summit

I’m fresh off the culture summit in San Francisco, it was my first time attending such a summit and I found the conversations around diversity and wellbeing in the workplace to be a refreshing change to the personal and business development conferences I’ve been attending.

Not to mention, I was surrounded by some bad ass change makers, like these lady bosses, and experienced a new kind of co-working at Campsyte, more on that in a future post.

What made the Culture summit unique was the topics of discussion, and the questions being explored. Questions like: What is culture? How do you build a culture of diversity in the workplace? How are millennials changing the landscape of the traditional workplace? Why is it more it important now than ever to focus on workplace culture? And how do we use technology to our advantage vs. our demise?

Data presented by Monica Adractas, Director of Workplace at Facebook showed that the average American touches their cell phone 2,617 times a day which mean each day Americans a whole touch their phone 8 billion times! That’s A LOT of touches. With so much technology competing for our attention our brains are evolving with lower attention spans, Monica goes on to say, and this is seen generationally with Gen X having an attention span of 12 seconds, Millennials are down to 8 seconds, and the up and coming Gen Zers… well they are down to 2 seconds. 2 seconds!!!

I nearly fell off my chair hearing those stats, but it’s the reality of our current social media driven society.

Social media isn’t going to go away but there is definitely room for improvement in how we engage with it. SnackNation Co-Founder, Sean Kelly, shared two really simple yet powerful messages to become a better version of yourself and effectively engage with (and without) social media:

Show up vulnerably
Keep it real: i.e. stop pretending you have it all together

All in all the prevailing take home message from the culture summit was that connection=transformation, but connected ≠ connecting. It’s important for all of us as human beings to start connecting. In my opinion a culture shift in the workplace starts with a culture shift within ourselves.

All this talk about social media and culture change also brings to mind the work that Dallas Hartwig is now doing around more social and less media. If you followed me back in my Nutritionize days you may have heard us mention Dallas and Melissa and their Whole 30 program. He’s moved beyond food now and offers some great insights.

I’m super excited that there’s a movement to shift our current workplace culture and create a culture of connectedness further blurring the lines of work/life, eradicating the need for balance and replacing it with harmony.

Staying with the theme of culture, I added a new podcast to my rotation which I’ve found extremely inspiring and interesting it’s called The Future of Work Podcast by Jacob Morgan. In his podcast, Jacob interviews thought leaders from around the globe to explore what the future of work is going to look like… well, in the future. Check it out.

While listening to The Fizzle Show, I was turned on to a new 4-part HBO documentary, The Defiant Ones, the name alone was enough to sell me on watching it. The documentary explores the lives of Dr. Dre and Jimmy Lovine and how they came together to craft the biggest deal in music history. HBO describes it as “a master class in how to work your way up from the bottom to beyond your wildest dreams.”

Lastly, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by a good friend and bay area colleague Roman Singh Nahal on his show The Best of Evergreen San Jose. We spent an hour talking about meditation and mindfulness and building a culture of wellbeing, it’s always fun to talk wellbeing especially with other change makers.