What the world needs now…

…is love sweet love.  As Burt Bacharach and Hal David said, that’s the only thing that there’s just too little of. I shall resist reminding you of the many horrible and ugly things happening in the world.  I shall refrain from listing the many many incidents of casual interpersonal violence that occur all too often…

…and empathy too!

This is a response to a post by Julie Drybrough, so it might be useful to check out her post before reading on.  What I liked about her post and most of her posts is that it enlivened me and gave me an insight into what goes on for HER, rather than just blether about the…

The insight illusion

Confucius is quoted as saying, “When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine yourself.” …and yet we reinforce our “us vs them” in response to real human tragedies in Syria, Paris, San Bernardino.  It’s hard…

Seven principles to strengthen relationships at work

That’s some good clickbait, huh? A friend observed “subtle undertones of humour” in my last post, so I thought I’d continue in that vein with a shameless clickbait title.  Following up on that last post, I want to illustrate something that is the realm of “soft skills” (eurgh) but is far from soft: maintaining healthy and…

Soft skills are not soft.

I once had someone suggest to me that I would not be capable of working amongst the “brutality” of business life.  I listened with great interest as there might have been some truth in what they were saying.  Upon extensive reflection, I considered what might be behind their comment, as it intrigued me enormously.  It intrigued…

Your Work is Your Work

Charles Darwin is apocryphally quoted as saying, “It’s not the biggest, the brightest, or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest.”  While he may not have actually said it, the sentiment stands. It is therefore vital that we develop ways and practices that assist us to learn about ourselves.  Much has…

Where is the love?

In “On the Waterfront”, Eve Marie Saint’s character, Edie, is on a date with Marlon Brandon’s character Terry, and as they sit and talk and get to know a little about each other, she enquires about his situation in life.  He’s a tough, street-hardened fighter, raised in a boys’ home after his father got bumped…

How do we get to WE?

There is something in the air.  Call it my natural human tendency to find patterns in things, but two recent conversations with two different clients in two different cities have reminded me of two other completely different clients in two completely different countries.  The parallels are striking.  It could be my bias towards systems thinking,…

Leadership is an inside job

So the world didn’t end on December 21, surprise, surprise.  Here we are in 2013, all systems still intact.  I have heard some speak of the Mayan December 21 end-of-all-things-prediction not so much an end of the world, but more of an end of one cycle and the beginning of another.  An end of things-as-they-were.…

The certainty of uncertainty

Sometimes you read something that really strikes a chord.  I recently saw this quote from Kurt Vonnegut:  “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”  In other times, I would read this and it would simply seem like a poetic truism, but I’m currently experiencing a number…