Why You Need to Change How You Hire and Manage to Optimize Workers' Time in the Flow State
How do the most productive and innovative companies do it? High Performance Story founder Cameron Powell reveals all in this explosive speech (5 min) at Silicon Valley's DisruptHR conference.
- Why you need to throw out your undifferentiated and uninteresting job descriptions now
- How hiring teams must interview for what really matters - strengths, not keywords of prior experience - through behavior-based interviewing Story
- And much more!
A Humanist perspective on work and play
Cameron Powell and other members of the High Performance Story Team offer audiences large and small a humanistic perspective on a variety of subjects
Cameron has an ideal background for teaching and writing on Story as a motivator and influencer of people. He is a memoirist and biographer, a writer and literary critic, a career, pitch, and speaking coach, an innovation consultant, and a former trial lawyer.
In recent years, he has been writing and speaking on a cycle of three works on the necessity and ingredients of Story.
Story in Society, Myth, and Legend
First came True History of the Camino de Santiago: The Stranger-than-Fiction Tale of the Typo that Invented Spain and the Biblical Loser Who Became a Legend, about how - and why - we create stories, or legends, in our religions and societies.
The Stories That Give Life Meaning
Next came Ordinary Magic: Promises I Kept to My Mother Through Life, Illness, and a Very Long Walk, which was about how we tell our stories to ourselves and our loved ones while they're alive, as well as after they're gone.
Story, or Meaning, at Work
Now, Cameron is writing Reinventing Talent, about stories for life and work. What should candidates and employers optimize for? How to understand who we are and what we do best? Get advance copies and join the conversation!
The Primacy of Human Talents
Human talent is the difference between successful organizations and their opposites. Unsuccessful organizations take workers for granted. The best know just how lucky they are, and their practices, policies, and hiring show it.
"What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals." - William Shakespeare
Why Career Seekers and Employers Alike Must Optimize for Superhuman Flow
"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." - Walt Whitman
Flow comes from our capacity to use our core strengths in a role and to sustainably find meaning in it. High engagement at work looks exactly like Flow.
Flow is the River that Powers the Economy.
It’s the Flow state you want to hack. That means strengths + meaning as discerned by your hiring team through an examined candidate story.
The Fuel and Healing of Meaning, Purpose, and Love
Founded on research-based principles of Positive Psychology, this talk focuses on how meaning, purpose, love, and other varieties of positivity can re-fill our reservoirs of resilience and allow us to better manage grief, depression, anxiety, and other emotions, and use them for motivation-fuel and growth.
How We Flourish: The Power of Positive Psychology and Resilience
The science of Positive Psychology changes the notions of ourselves we were born with as much as quantum theory changed physics: once we see the truth of change, nothing can ever be the same.
How and Why We Must Tell Our Story
Drawing from 15 years of career coaching, his study of memoir, psychology, and meaning, Cameron Powell speaks on the experience of grieving, healing, and setting a course animated by the power of our own Story.
Psychological Safety Just Means Love - and Your Teams Need More of It
"One is never so bold as when one is sure of being loved." - Sigmund Freud
Research by Google, Gallup, and many more confirm that an employee who feels safe to question, experiment, raise her hand, and fail . . . is the most productive and creative employee. And the effect is even greater on teams.
Empathy + Tolerance + Diversity = Profit
It's a complex web of cause and effect, but diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and thinking make for stronger teams, better products, and greater productivity.
But how do you get there? This talk is a manifesto of what we can do to make diversity really work for our organizations.
Death, Dying, Duty, and Ultimate Meaning
What can we do for the dying? What do we owe our loved ones? And how do these inquiries make us think and feel more clearly about our own lives, and how we spend them, and with whom, and doing what?
Cameron Powell, Professional Speaker
“Teaching, training, and inspiring, through evidence and Story, is what I do."
"No other founder coach has been deep inside both courtrooms and startups, or knows his way around the scientific method as well as the historical and even neural bases for Story.”
-- T. Determan
Constructed from the unusual DNA of a trial lawyer and trainer, a jokester and speaker, a writer and acting coach, Cameron Powell applies the powerful High Performance Story method to coach founders on everything from their personal and professional stories to their stories about their team, product, and startup as a competitive investment
Talk to us about speaking to your group today!
Let's discuss what your teams most need, and we'll customize it, show up ready to teach and learn and play, and deliver.