Posts under ‘Leadership’

TED.com has exploded in popularity as an online place to hear and see ideas from really interesting people from the around the world. Now that TED.com has licensed their name to encourage independent TED-like conferences, us locals can also participate in person.
Last Thursday April 26th, a group of distinguished speakers and over one hundred attendees [...]

Last time, I introduced the roles of prophets, critics, and truth-tellers in enriching the ecology of leadership. I failed to mention however that there is an implied assumption that those truth-tellers and prophets are adaptive.
This is, of course, not the case.
Pundits, deniers, and “false” prophets that disguise themselves as truth-tellers are plentiful. There are still [...]

Continuing from the last article, we know that leadership is not just a position. But there are many roles played within a healthy ecology of
leadership. What are some of the roles played in this ecology of leadership? How then can you cultivate these roles in the ecology?
Here are three roles that often goes unmentioned in [...]

Last time, I provided a more detailed description of what leadership is. Today I wanted to explore this notion that leadership is more an ecology than a formal position or person.
In any organization, we all recognize that there are formal authorities (managers, directors, supervisors) and then there are informal authorities (people we would naturally go [...]

What is leadership?
We associate many aphorisms about leadership. Leaders walk the talk, have a compelling vision, model the way, serve the people, inspire people’s best selves. Peter Drucker quipped, “Management is about doing things right. Leadership is about doing the right things.”
Sometimes I think we end up with a laundry list of ideals that [...]

When it comes to inspirational women, you don’t want to miss President Sirleaf and her cabinet of “Iron Ladies”. A grandmother of eight and having served time in jail for her political beliefs, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the first elected female president of Africa.
In this documentary film,
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/ironladies/
we follow President Sirleaf and her cabinet as they [...]

I would answer, “Well of course, I’m a flexible and adaptable person,” and be done with the question. But what if being an adaptive leader is a continuous struggle to help oneself and the group meet complex life challenges that are often beyond the group’s capabilities? Upon second thought, maybe it’s a question I’m [...]

The Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton set sail on the Endurance with twenty-seven men to cross the uncharted continent. But a day before he could set foot on solid ice, the Endurance was locked and eventually crushed by the ice floes. It took months of waiting in one of the harshest places on the planet, making [...]

…continued from Part I…
He felt the roots of the trees
Pull him into the earth.
Reality dissolved into dreams.
Thoughts became elusive fantasies.
Louder and louder
The dead screamed and howled
Until he thought he would go mad.
With this wonderfully amazing human brain, we have received the gift of consciousness. But as Joseph Campbell suggests, we pay the price of two [...]

Once upon a time there was a peasant boy
who dreamed of becoming a hero.
He swung tree branches like a battle axe
and skewered invisible evil monsters
with his sharpened stick.
All this before supper time!
Doesn’t every new adventure begin when we have the dream, but not the ability? We may be a peasant boy… poor in status, poor [...]