Tag: work experience

Title: reflection on the wet floor | Credit: Albert Gößwein | Source: Flickr | License: CC BY-NC 2.0

Leadership Humility, Honesty, and Humor

One could say that I have been a bit obsessed with leadership and learning for most of my life, and I finally came to the conclusion that great leaders could be distinguished by three simple characteristics. Read more to find out.

Title: Unbind Me | Credit: Duncan Rawlinson - Duncan.co | Source: Flickr | License: CC BY-NC 2.0

Grace or Disgrace

In Nexus, Yuval Harari concludes that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information. Systems, whether human or artificial, can evolve and self-correct when they promote conversation and mutuality and that they devolve when they give into blind subservience. 

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Attribution of Variance

One of my favorite courses in graduate school was research evaluation which involved the analysis of study designs.

It was fascinating to me to figure out how to determine the impact of independent variables on dependent variables and how to factor out how each potential cause created a specific effect.

Credit: Kelly Sikkema | License: CC0

Vitality in Virtuality in a Covid 19 World

In 1995, I wrote a book on managing virtual teams. At the time, virtuality was in its infant stages. There was no Zoom, Hang Out, or High Five. The world wide web had only been invented in 1990. The internet, even in its excruciating slowness, still sparked the beginning of the virtual age. I taught virtual teaming at IBM and many other companies to introduce new ways of living, learning, and working in a more Read More

Parenting for Interdependence

When I was a kid growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, I experienced what it felt like to be raised by a village. The whole neighborhood had an open door policy. I could freely and fearlessly walk into any house—the doors were always unlocked—and just hang out. Wherever we happened to be playing, the parents acted more like resources than cops. Any parent would take disciplinary action when needed with the full support of Read More

Title: The Creation of Adam Pie Packed | Author: Mario Klingemann | Source: Own Work | License: CC BY-NC 2.0

Demonize Digitize or Democratize

In this post, I’m going to discuss how demonization and digitization can undermine democracy and what we need to do to restore democracy in the world. I know…two pretty big challenges for a short post, but here’s my best shot. When I went through Army Basic Training during the Vietnam War, many of the exercises were designed to demonize the Vietnamese people. When we stabbed our bayonets into dummies, we were instructed to yell, “Kill Read More

Untitled, by Chris Lawson

Transformational Processes

As a follow-up to my post on wild and crazy ideas, I’ve been thinking about the process for transformation, i.e. how do individuals and organizations implement ideas once they are generated. I know lots of people who are idea-generating engines, but their locomotive jumps the tracks or runs out of rails when it comes time to do the hard and laborious work of implementation. There are exceptions, of course, but turning ideas into reality is Read More

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Sanity 101

A 21-year-old white nationalist drives 600 miles to El Paso, Texas and kills 22 men, women and children with his assault weapon because he hates immigrants―particularly Hispanics. If this isn’t insanity, I don’t know what is. Let’s face it. We now find ourselves in the ranks of the insane.

Marianne Williamson cites a “dark psychic force” happening in America. Russ Douthat describes a “black spiritual hole” as the source of the hatred and violence ripping apart our hearts and our heartland. Read More

Photo by aitoff, CC0

Seven Essential Qualities of Leadership

“Well-behaved women seldom make history.” —Laurel Thatcher Ulrich In 1982, my dear friend Dr. Mark Edwards introduced a fair, impartial and objective tool to measure leadership effectiveness. He called it 360 feedback, which is now ubiquitous in organizations throughout the world. The idea is to give leaders the gift of multi-source feedback on critical leadership competencies so that they can understand more clearly how they are perceived by direct reports, peers, and more senior executives. Read More

#LiamGillick's The Game of War #installation at the @fundacao_serralves teaches museum-goers about military theory in a chess-like game sprawled over a game board of 500 squares. | Author: @mafaldamarcos | Source: designmilk on Flickr | License: CC BY-SA 2.0

MindShare

At a family holiday dinner my older daughter asked the table, “What are your hopes and dreams for 2019?” As we went around to each person, most folks wished for less political craziness and more environmental sanity. I agreed with those sentiments, but in my customary role as the outlier, I said I hoped to exude more calm in the current crisis, to stay positive in a sea of negativity, and to focus more on Read More

The Library of Congress Hughey Gold [child with football]

Football Culture

“When I won the world championship, in 1972, the United States had an image of, you know, a football country, a baseball country, but nobody thought of it as an intellectual country.” —Bobby Fischer Well Bobby, I guess the more things change the more they remain the same. Speaking of football, my family was recently watching the annual Ohio State vs. Michigan football game that would determine who would go to the Rose Bowl and Read More

Title: Opening The Objectivist Drug Party - Zach Blas & Genomic Intimacy - Heather Dewey-Hagborg | Author: Hanneke Wetzer | Source: M U Eindhoven | License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Artificial Emotions

“The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a person while she or he lives – the death of genuine feeling, the death of inspired response, the awareness that makes it possible to feel the pain or glory of other people in yourself.” —Norman Cousins We just bought an Amazon Echo, so we would have the facts of the world at our simple command. “Alexa, what’s the weather?” “Alexa, what’s the news?” “Alexa, play Read More