I have been listening this evening to a podcast (.mp3) by Buddhist teacher James Foster on the single most important question in any spiritual path: so what? That’s it. That is the question. It is neither a trivial question nor one that is completley cavalier. In fact it is a profoundly important question in very many realms and it is the utter foundation of the grounding practices that take facilitation, leadership and work from the esoteric to the real. So heading into a week of teaching, I think I will anchor a lot of what I am …
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Everyone wants action – that’s the current business buzzword. Dialogue and conversation seem fine “but they have to focus on action.” It’s almost growing tiresome to hear it. The problem with the mantra is that people rarely have any idea of what action really looks like. Very few people think through to the personal responsibility THEY might take in animating action. Even less see conversation and dialogue AS action. But today in my email box, comes confirmation that action is intimately connected to dialogue and when passion and reposnibility come together, real things happen. Back in the fall, my business …
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It’s hard to get enough of Ricardo Semler, the CEO of Brazil’s Semco. In a new article from Strategy+Business he talks about participatory management: Asked why true participative management is still such a rarity, Mr. Semler cites two elements that he says are in sadly short supply: “One, the people in charge wanting to give up control. This tends to eliminate some 80 percent of business people. Two, a profound belief that humankind will work toward its best version, given freedom; that would eliminate the other 20 percent,” he says. The only reason there aren’t more people like Ricardo Semler …
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George Nemeth got riffing on my post about project management as jazz and a really cool conversation evolved in his comments (scroll down). One of the comments from John Galt challenged the idea that strategy can be created in an emergent and improvisiational framework: The jazz metaphor is apt for improvisation. Not for strategy as we are speaking about it. One nice definition of improvisation in strategy is the act of �creating strategy as it is being implemented� or making it up as you go along. Now, classic strategy is a process for thoughtful managers in mindful organizations. Mindful � …
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Notes on Dreaming, inspired by the Sunday Open Space at gassho… In the Ojibway teachings I have received, all the animals at creation were given a gift. For humans, our gift was to dream. According to Elder Basil Johnston, although we can all dream, dreaming – more properly, visioning – is said to be most important for men. Women are said to have been given the gift of self-fulfillment through creating life but for men, we need to find self-fulfillment through a vision quest. And so, as has been the case from time immemorial, young men under the tutelage of …