Category: The Business of Shared Leadership
Having competed in sports and business my whole life, I understand the traditional view of winning. Winning is about supremacy and thus requires defeat. For every winner there must be an equal and corresponding loser. The Roman Colosseum is an early manifestation of the consequences of losing. Here men fought to the death. For you…
READ ARTICLEIf the new path to organizational excellence rests upon dispersed power, then followership as we know it must reinvent itself. A follower is a person who moves or travels behind someone or something. But when the leaders learn to get out of the way, a fresh path will be cleared and illuminated for all. The…
READ ARTICLEIn October of this year I had the honor of giving the keynote address at the LBM STRATEGIES conference in Denver. The 50-minute talk was video recorded, and I would like to share it with you. I hope you can find a quiet time over the holidays to relax, enjoy, watch, and reflect. What if…
READ ARTICLE“Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother, and are not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children?” —Black Elk “The Divine Matrix is the container that holds the universe, the bridge between all things, and the mirror that shows us what we have created.” —Gregg Braden The…
READ ARTICLE“To get people out of their misery, out of this genocide, that is the main reason, the motive and purpose of the military operation that we began in Donbas and Ukraine.” —Vladimir Putin Hancock Lumber has a long-standing customer from Pakistan. Each year we ship his company dozens of containers loaded with eastern white pine….
READ ARTICLE“Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was, because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because [though] he may have surrendered, . . . he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never…
READ ARTICLE“Man should not be in the service of society; society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that’s what is threatening the world at this minute.” —Joseph Campbell The first mission of any company should be to make work meaningful, rewarding,…
READ ARTICLE“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere—it is within each…
READ ARTICLE“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” —Henry Ford The traditional definition of winning is Darwinian. Every winner requires an equal and offsetting loser. For me to win, someone else must lose. Picture the Roman Colosseum, where it was kill or be killed—eat or be eaten. According to this view,…
READ ARTICLE“Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.” —Romans 5:12 I’ve found a new favorite book. It’s titled Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman. You may have to search for it, because it threatens too many conventional…
READ ARTICLE“Love yourself first and everything else falls into line.” —Lucille Ball In January of 1988 I drove from Bowdoin College to Bridgton Academy to interview for a teaching and coaching job. Upon arrival I found myself sitting on the less powerful side of a large oak desk. Bob Walker, the headmaster, sat opposite me….
READ ARTICLERushing into action, you fail. Trying to grasp things, you lose them. Forcing a project to completion, you ruin what was almost ripe. Therefore the Master takes action by letting things take their course. He remains as calm at the end as at the beginning. He simply reminds people of who they have always been….
READ ARTICLE“To have a comeback you have to have a setback.” —Mr. T Falmouth High School—January 1983. I jump for a rebound. The next thing I know, I’m lying on the court, clutching my right shoulder in extreme pain. I would learn an hour later at the hospital that I’d dislocated my shoulder. Shoulders are pretty…
READ ARTICLE“No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” —John Wheeler, physicist Alison and I have been married for thirty-two years. During that time, we have had four dogs, all yellow Labs. Bowdoin, Tampa, Tucker, and Scout are their names. Only the last of which is still with us today. Most dogs…
READ ARTICLEFlashback #1: Our daughter Abby is five years old, and blindfolded. In the middle of the screened-in porch hangs a piñata. It’s a colorful donkey twirling gently in the breeze. In her hands Abby holds a yellow Wiffle bat commandeered from the garage. Abby swings and misses, yet all the other children cheer, confident in…
READ ARTICLE“If one person in your family commits a crime, the entire family must be purged.” “When you have food in your stomach you can think about the meaning of life, but when you are starving, all you can think about is hunger.” “I never saw a map of the world. As an Asian I didn’t…
READ ARTICLE“If you want to be a champion you’ve got to feel like one, you’ve got to look like one, you’ve got to act like one.” —Red Auerbach John Kohtala was the best jump shooter I ever met. If he could get his right elbow above your left defensive hand, he was going to shoot, and it…
READ ARTICLE“It takes a lot of different flowers to make a bouquet.” —Ancient Islamic proverb I can still picture the world from my dad’s shoulders. I’m two and a half years old and he has an ankle in each hand. My head is above his and I feel as if I’m on top of the world…
READ ARTICLE“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” —Joseph Campbell It would be impossible to acknowledge the oneness that defines our universe and then go back to work as a supervisor, executive, or team leader and manage “employees” the old-fashioned way—barking out instructions with a heavy hand. Workers historically have been commodities….
READ ARTICLEGo ahead and hate your neighbor Go ahead and cheat a friend Do it in the name of heaven You can justify it in the end. —One Tin Soldier Why has acknowledging our universal connectivity and oneness been downplayed for so long? The answer has two parts. First, only recently has scientific understanding advanced far…
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