Love and Work in the Same Sentence?

What better week than Valentine's Week to talk about LOVE and WORK in the same sentence? I'm working on a presentation for next week called "It Doesn't Have to be A Dilbert World," and it's becoming clearer to me as I read about Scott Adams and the great living he's been able to make by calling attention to the way we've known our working world, that there could be another way to look at things.

However, I also see that the Dilbert world is alive and well, as I took one look at Scott Adams DilbertBlog and I see that there are 347 comments to his post about having sex with a robot.

I guess that is one way to talk about love and work, but I'm more interested in how we can talk about our work - and talk with the people where we spend the majority of our time.

The photo you see here is from Southwest Airlines' website. Southwest uses Love Field in Dallas as their headquarters. Their corporate annual meeting is held on February 14. Their stockticker is not SWA, as you might expect, it's LUV. Talk about spreading the LOVE!

Some people, like Steve Farber and Tim Sanders, to name just two, have paved the way to having conversations about love and work. In Steve's first book, The Radical Leap, he says that LEAP is an acronym that demonstrates what all extreme leaders possess: Love, Energy, Audacity, and Proof. His second book, The Radical Edge, goes on to say how we can do work that we love in the service of people we love for customers who love what we do. What a great way to think of work!

Tim Sanders, Chief Solutions Officer and leadership coach at Yahoo! and now a world-famous speaker and author, has written a couple of books about love at work. I'm a big fan of Love is the Killer Ap, where he talks very openly about the advantage those businesspeople who use love as a point of differentiation in business will "separate ourselves from our competitors just as world-class distance runners separate themselves from the rest of the pack trailing behind them."

Tim's definition of love in the workplace is simply "the selfless promotion of the growth of the other."

How different would our workplaces look and feel if we knew that everyone was loving everyone else? It can happen.

So, for tomorrow, think about loving everyone you come into contact with - using Tim's definition (not Scott Adams'). Come back and leave a comment about what you witnessed at work on Valentine's Day 2007.