Just back from an amazing Art of Hosting in rural Pennsylvania. Found this in my email box upon my return, send to me by my friend Toke: Not just any talk is conversation Not any talk raises consciousness good conversation has an edge It opens your eyes to something It quickens your ears And good conversation reverberates It keeps on talking in your mind later in the day; The next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said The reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness Your mind and heart have been moved Your are at …
Marshall McLuhan on the role of artists in harvesting patterns: “When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition, in other words, to structure the experience. I think this is part of the artist’s world. The artist, when he encounters the present…is always seeking new patterns, new pattern recognition, which is his task. The absolute indispensability of the artist is that he alone in the present can give the pattern recognition. He alone has the sensory awareness necessary to tell us what our world is made of. He is more important than …
Photo by Hamid Masoumi This question of the responsibility of love continues to live in me. I wrote a comment at Dave Pollard’s blog that captures another facet of it: Love IS a social issue and engaging in the world with love is a bit of a trick. It not only accelerates innovation and “better”, it is a double edged sword too. I think there is such a thing as “the responsibility of love” which refers to the way we wield the weapons of the heart in the world when we are working in the territory of open heartedness. When …
Taholah, Washington If this article is any indication, the future of management will require more hosts and less bosses. Hierarchies are disappearing, top-down and centralized is giving way to distributed, and organizations are becoming more open and engaging of stakeholders. That is true everywhere in my experience, including here at the Quinault Indian Nation where we are reframing the tribal government’s strategic plan in several unique ways. First we have established a core team of stakeholders from the government and community who are willing to take responsibility for stewarding the plan. Second, the core team has proposed …
Tahola, Washington From Euan: Management is becoming about noticing and enabling rather than driving and controlling.Get yourselves a big melting pot of different social tools that engender different conversations and expressions of intent from your staff, watch like a hawk, spot the cool stuff, fan the flames and then protect the baby shoots from your spoilers. Nice.