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 …
Merlin Mann points to a nice piece on the fragmentation of attention: A live BlackBerry or even a switched-on mobile phone is an admission that your commitment to your current activity is as fickle as Renée Zellweger’s wedding vows. Your world turns into a never-ending cocktail party where you’re always looking over your virtual shoulder for a better conversation partner. Recently I facilitated a meeting in which there were so many BlackBerries, I felt like making a pie. Some people had BlackBerries AND cell phones, and both were on. What struck me was actually how the fragmentation of the room’s …
Ottawa, Ont. A spring day in the nation’s capital, sunny and warm, everyone in short sleeves and the latest sunglasses, drinking beer on patios in the Byward Market and just showing off. I’m sitting in an old haunt called “Memories” on Clarence Street, in the shadow of the American Embassy that wasn’t here 12 years ago when I last lived in Ottawa. Beside me on the floor is a bag of Quebec cheese, some of which I am going to eat with my mother and father and sister on my mum’s birthday tomorrow. Like every place I’ve lived in in …
There are many ways of producing overtones in music. Anyone who vibrates air in a tube for a living produces overtones as their way of making music. THis includes brass players, didgeridoo, alpenhorn and so on. Buglers get their notes strictly from overtones, as they have no keys on their instruments. And of course, vocally, it is possible to produce overtomes as well, giving the eerie sounds of Tuuvan throat singing. i love overtones because they remind me that there is so much more to the music than what is immediately audible. It is a …
From whiskey river: No Knowing Do not follow the path I say for it does not exist you cannot find enlightenment contained within a list do not follow leaders they cannot set you free and perhaps now most importantly listen not to me. – Ikkyu I’m in the middle of a period of teaching at the moment, having just come off a two day Open Space practice workshop with college students and a three day Art of Hosting with Aboriginal youth leaders and coming up to a three day OST practice retreat. I can’t think of better advice for my …