Category: Systems for managing others
January 31st, 2011
Talk about a tough job load! Yes, I know how hard many of our CEO’s have it, especially the women CEO’s and executives who not only have to juggle the demands of employees, customers, their Board, the Street and whatever current key stakeholder has their hooks into them at any given moment. But for a minute consider Moses… when God handed him the Ten Commandments and told him he had to both lead his people out of servitude, into the desert AND institute an whole new set of policies and procedures.
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March 27th, 2010
This particular line of reasoning was originally inspired by an educator, Parker Palmer (http://www.couragerenewal.org/), who wrote a few books on this theme, Courage to Teach and Courage to Lead. His hypothesis goes something like this…
Good teachers are good at two essential elements of teaching – they know their subject (content experts) and they know how to teach it (pedagogy). All well and good.
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February 19th, 2010
As an executive coach, serving a diverse array of organizations, I have the opportunity to witness the world of business (both for and not-for profit types of businesses) from a very interesting perspective; kind of inside/outside.
Often it’s not a pretty sight.
High drama masquerading as management. Disregard for family life, work/life balance. Positions of power wielded as weapons. Lack of acknowledgement for work well done. A general disregard of individual contributions, and/or team efforts. Lack of accountability. Failure to speak the truth. The list goes on, but I’m sure you know it all too well.
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November 12th, 2009
Well… first, polarities. That paradoxical pairing of seemingly incompatible opposites, that, it turns out, are more often than not just two sides of the very same coin.
For all of us, the only universal polarity is life and death. We all were born. We all will die. Now, is it just me, or do you notice that, even though this is the ONLY thing we ALL have in common, it rarely, if ever, gets talked about! The death and/or dying part anyway, unless we’re talking about someone else’s funeral.
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October 30th, 2009
Ok, the World Series is upon us, and, as an old fan of the Yankees, having grown up with Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, the stuff that heroes and legends are made of, you might think that ‘ground balls’ references that particular fall classic. Nope. Ground balls, is to fly balls, I learned the other day, as slam dunk is to sinking a three-pointer at the buzzer, from the opposite end of the court.
Forget the sports metaphors. One’s easy. The other is hard. What I learned about the beauty of ground balls occurred while playing outside with my nine-month old retriever puppy, who, in the seven months that we’ve been raising him, has not gotten the hang of retrieving, at all. Until I threw him a ground ball. And then another. And another…
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