The Word at Work: Mottainai — the regret of waste, and what it means for how we work

Welcome to Season 2 of Here's an Idea Worth Playing With — a new direction for the podcast. Each episode, one word. Its origin, its meaning, and what it still has to say about the way we work.This week: Mottainai. A Japanese concept that broadly translates as the regret of waste. We associate it with natural resources — but what about our human ones? Time, energy, and attention are finite. Unlike money, we can't generate more. And yet organisations squander them often through confusion, duplicate work, misalignment, meetings that shouldn't exist and more..Mottainai asks us to notice that — and to think more carefully before we spend what we can never get back.Find out more about this concept for the workplace here : https://www.cultivatedmanagement.com/mottainai-a-philosophy-for-avoiding-waste/