Here are a couple of ideas to get you motivated for another work week. This article on O’Reilly Radar discusses the importance of an ideal or mission in motivating your team. If your team believes in something more than just working for a paycheck, higher quality, better ideas, and more productivity will follow. Whether the ideal is “outstanding customer service”—our mantra here at SAGE—our “we do it better than everyone else,” there are a host of ideals for your team to aspire to. By giving your people something to believe in, your organization will get higher customer service, quality, and greater involvement. The trick is making them believe, but that stems from the management’s sincerity and adherence to the ideal itself.

So now that you have a motivated team, when was the last time you had a blank check on a project? Yeah, we have never had one of those either. While we like to bemoan the shackles time, money, and management place on us, Chris Anderson of “The Long Tail” fame talks about something we have known for years but too often forget: those constraints can be the source of inspiration. Ingenuity is about overcoming challenges, and IT and ingenuity should go hand-in-hand. So before you complain about a small budget or a small team, think about how your constraints can be a source of inspiration. Just one example: SpaceShipOne—human spaceflight on a shoestring team and budget.