Blog Posts — Page 11
The Constitution as Culture Audit
One of my favorite tasks as an organizational psychologist is to design, administer, and evaluate culture audits. The design process is the most important part because it entails asking the people in an organization to create norms and values of their own choosing. In focus groups, I ask people to share what they believe are the desired and required norms for their organizations, i.e. what kind of work environment would they find most exciting and Read More
Telling it Like it Isn’t
“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” —Leonardo da Vinci We recently drove from Asheville, North Carolina to San Diego, California—about 36 hours of driving time. I was pleasantly surprised not to hit a single pothole. The roads were in excellent shape from coast to coast. Thank you, President Obama, for your stimulus package. The bump-less ride made me think of the broad assault Trump has made on the Obama legacy by Read More
Facing Fears
She turned toward her purpose. She wanted to have children, a family, a career. She was full of joy as twin fetuses grew in her womb. They decided to come early at 26 weeks. The girl weighed a pound and a half with sepsis. The boy was a fragile two pounds. She feared her dream and her babies would die. She fiercely faced the terrifying probabilities. She turned toward what she needed to do. She Read More
No Dancing in These Halls
“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.” —Nietzsche On a big gig with big Pharma, I brought my older daughter to help with collecting data and gathering impressions. After a week of intensive focus groups and walking through the corporate headquarters, she dryly commented, “Hmmm, there’s no dancing in these halls!” By that time in my career, I had worked with hundreds of organizations around the world, Read More
Mindful Walking with Energy’s Way
I love to walk. My wife and I have trekked hundreds of miles on gorgeous trails in New Zealand, Patagonia, Iceland, our National Parks and many more. For the last 10 years, we have started out almost every day with a three mile walk with our dog. It was a matter of necessity at first—no walk, no peace from the dog. Now he just sleeps all day waiting for the next walk. Over the past Read More
Care, Connect, Contribute
In 1938, Sir Nicholas Winton started rescuing children from certain death in the Nazi concentration camps. He singlehandedly brought 669 children from Czechoslovakia to Britain and connected them with families there. Most of their families perished in Auschwitz. He never told a soul about his efforts and kept it a secret for 50 years until his wife found a notebook with the names and pictures of all the children he had saved. Sir Winton cared Read More
Identity and Unity
I was listening to a Krista Tippett podcast on a recent 8-hour car ride. Krista was interviewing Nikki Giovanni, a world-renowned, African-American poet, activist and educator. Ms. Giovanni was discussing the poem she delivered at Virginia Tech after the horrible shooting tragedy there in which 32 innocent people were killed by a troubled loner. I was struck by the power of her words and their relevance to where we are today – particularly after Orlando Read More
The Menace of Mendacity
Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters. —Albert Einstein There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting. —Buddha Truth is not a trivial thing. Words matter. Being accurate requires curiosity, diligence, and rigor. I know that everyone has a different idea about what is truth. Much of the debate started when Pontius Pilate asked Read More
Marketing and Leadership
“When you are made a leader, you aren’t given a crown; you are given the responsibility to bring out the best in others.” —Jack Welch, Former CEO of General Electric There is an old adage that leaders are born not made. That myth became popular as people observed that most leaders had personality traits such as intelligence, charisma, attractive appearance, and confidence. I believe the truth is that effective leaders are typically born AND made, Read More
Inspiration and Aspiration
“To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.” —Khalil Gibran, The Madman I once worked for a company that aspired to be a $10B corporation. I said to the executives at that time, “That may be a good goal but it surely isn’t a compelling vision, and it does nothing to inspire me.” I left the company after two years. Part Read More
The Masses and the Margins
“And the soul is like the eye: when resting upon that on which truth and being shine, the soul perceives and understands and is radiant with intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about, and is first of one opinion and then of another, and seems to have no intelligence.” —Plato, Republic, VI, 508 I worked in inmate rehabilitation for eight years in Read More
The Hard Truth of Mental Illness
Crawl into this experience. Feel it. You have a mentally ill brother who has been tormented by his disease for over 50 years. He has suffered from delusions and voices his whole life.
He claims he knows Deep Throat. He is convinced that the FBI has implanted listening devices in his brain and in his teeth. He believes his parents are clones, and he is not sure who is real and who isn’t.
Prophets and Their Purposes
The world has been blessed with powerful messages from prophets of the past. Five of these prophets have a present-day influence on billions of people: Moses, Laozi, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad. These five men were the impetus for Judaism, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Those religions represent almost 6 billion of the 7.6 billion people on the planet. Given those numbers, it seems appropriate to discuss who they were and what they were about. Read More
Featured Author: George Yancy
On June 19th in the New York Times, George Yancy published a Stone article entitled “Is Your God Dead?” I was so inspired by the power and prose of his piece that I am turning the microphone over today to this brilliant scholar will not only give you a break from my endless ranting, but will hopefully rekindle your outrage and stoke your passion for justice. After I read this piece for the third time (yes, Read More
Disruption, Destruction, and Distraction
Independence Day 2017 “Power can be very addictive, and it can be corrosive. And it’s important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power, whether it be here or elsewhere.” —George W. Bush, 2017 Disruption can be for better for worse. Luckily for me, the two major disruptions in my life turned out for the better. In 1968, at age 23, I was sent to Vietnam as a soldier in Military Read More
Nouns and Norms
I have always loved new ideas and embraced them enthusiastically. I have read an enormous amount about a ton of concepts, and I have accumulated a large repertoire of nouns in my vocabulary. But nouns require action verbs to make them real.
As Bucky Fuller said, God is a verb.
A Prayer for the Future
Oh Infinite Possibility We give thanks to the spiritual role models of the ancient past: Laozi, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna and more Who taught us That transcending the ego is more important than feeding the ego That love conquers hate That, in the stillness of silence, we develop our souls We give thanks for the towering giants of the recent past: Martin, Bobby, Nelson, Teddy, Franklin, Eleanor, Jane, Mahatma, and more Who taught us The principles Read More
Balance and Unity
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.” —Abraham Lincoln, Nov. Read More
Evolution of Consciousness
My wife sometimes accuses me of selective engagement. She says I am much more open to conversation with people whom I find physically attractive, intellectually stimulating, emotionally responsive, or spiritually evolved.
Guilty as charged. As it turns out, the idea of selective engagement goes back 500 million years.
Quests and Questions
As long as humans have told stories, we’ve shared tales about people going on quests. There is a long list of these tales about quests of one sort or another in history and in literature. Here are a few of the more famous quests. About 2,000 BC, Gilgamesh embraced the quest to find the secret to eternal life. He started out as a cruel despot who raped any women he fancied. After losing his best Read More
Shams and Shame
In the book, Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale, Henry Wonham quotes Twain as saying, “the moral responsibility of the American humorist is ‘the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities,’ and ‘the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence.’” Thus, he said, “the humorist is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges, and all kindred swindles, and is the natural friend of human rights and liberties.” Twain offered high praise Read More
Courage and Creativity
It’s scary to be outside the margins of “normality.”
As any person (whether they they think of themselves as creative or not) knows, introducing newness goes hand-in-hand with disruption of established rules and expectations. But if we can find the courage to break out of rigid structures, we may be rewarded with finding a clearer path to joy, meaning, and purpose.
The Fragility of Freshness
“If you can’t smell the fragrance, don’t come into the garden of love.” –Rumi “Let me not die while I am still alive.” –Hasidic prayer Knowing when to cut your avocado is a tricky task. One day too early and the fruit inside is too hard. One day too late, and it turns brown and mushy. Finding optimal freshness is a challenge with fruit and with life. I hate it when my strawberries get Read More
The Timeless and the Timely
It’s hard to find elevated and elevating messages these days. It seems to me that we keep looking for quick and easy solutions to complex problems that require deep debate, creative thinking, and thoughtful analysis.
In this post, I revisit some sources of ancient wisdom, finding timeless principles that can help us deal with today’s challenges.