Stop.
Wait,
Listen…
Think.
We are all so proactive, action-oriented, and engaged, working to measure, manage, lead, and drive our innovative, design-led, customer-centric organizations. Phew! Continue reading Stop. Start a Doing Diet
Leadership as Creative Work
This beautiful article on reading and imagination by Neil Gaiman reminded me of a leadership truism.
Leadership is a creative act.
Or, as John Maeda of RISD and Becky Bermont said in the HBR, “Every budget, every meeting, every presentation, every decision is a chance for a creative act.” Continue reading Leadership as Creative Work
Conceptual Frameworks and Mental Models: An Introduction
It seems that every sight, sound and idea we experience is processed through a conceptual framework in our mind.
As you read this, the shape, colors, and contrasting black squiggles on white are being converted, via frameworks you and I share, into images, words, sentences, and connected ideas in your mind.
Imagine how confusing life would be if we had to categorize, name and evaluate the ideas of the letter S, smartphone, windows, tree, and sunlight afresh every time we encountered them? It is no wonder to me that babies are awake so little when they are first born, free of frameworks; all that uncategorized input to process!
Continue reading Conceptual Frameworks and Mental Models: An IntroductionFailure as the Death of the Illusion of Control
You’ve seen the t-shirt, “Pain is the feeling of weakness leaving your body.” Maybe the pain of failure is the feeling of being relieved of our illusions. But, where’s the gain in this pain?
The next time I find myself brooding over my failures, I will ask myself:
- What failed exactly?
- What assumptions was I making about the nature of the elements, the mechanisms and the processes I was working with?
- Did I think I could control the outcomes based on that understanding?
- What might I learn from the death of any illusions built into my assumptions?
The Wisdom Movement
The Movement
We believe that a movement’s afoot and we resonate with these statements that seem to emanate from the movement’s ideals:
“I am on the track of a more essential thing: the compassionate uses of a mortal mind and body.”
–Czeslaw Milosz tr. by Catherine Madsen
“A man who has once perceived, however temporarily and however briefly, what makes greatness of soul, can no longer be happy if he allows himself to be petty, self-seeking, troubled by trivial misfortunes, dreading what fate may have in store for him.
The man capable of greatness of soul will open wide the windows of his mind, letting the winds blow freely upon it from every portion of the universe. He will see himself and life and the world as truly as our human limitations will permit; realizing the brevity and minuteness of human life, he will realize also that in individual minds is concentrated whatever of value the known universe contains.
And he will see that the man whose mind mirrors the world becomes in a sense as great as the world. In emancipation from the fears that beset the slave of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man.”
–Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, 1930 p.227
Continue reading The Wisdom Movement