Category: The Business of Shared Leadership
“The earth and myself are of one mind.” —Chief Joseph “Hey, Dad, what’s wrong?” one of our daughters asks. Whenever I’m asked that question, I’m a tad disappointed (in myself), and yet fascinated by the intuition of the person who has spotted what I was trying to conceal. We’re together as a family, so I’m…
READ ARTICLE“Winds in the east, mist blowing in, like something is brewing and about to begin. Can’t put me finger on what lies in store, but I think what’s to happen all happened before.” —Bert, Mary Poppins It chokes me up to see news footage of ordinary Ukrainian citizens fighting the Russian army, street to street…
READ ARTICLE“It is hard to follow one great vision in this world of darkness and of many changing shadows. Among them men get lost.” —Black Elk In my last post I wrote about what the sandpiper knows, the tiny bird that moves predictably with the unpredictable. No two waves are ever the same, yet the sandpiper…
READ ARTICLE“We Indians think of the Earth and the whole universe as a never-ending circle, and in this circle, man is just another animal. The buffalo and the coyote are our brothers, the birds, our cousins. Even the tiniest ant, even a louse, even the smallest flower you can find, they are all relatives.” —Jenny Leading…
READ ARTICLE“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” —John Muir The most transformative concept I’ve learned from my time at Pine Ridge is “Mitakuye Oyasin.” Each person translates this phrase in their own way, but the essence is always the same: We are all…
READ ARTICLE“Nobody is superior, nobody is inferior, but nobody is equal either. People are simply unique, incomparable. You are you. I am I.” —Osho If we don’t share our stories they die with us, Verola Spider said to me one afternoon as we sat together on the porch at the Singing Horse Trading Post on the Pine Ridge Indian…
READ ARTICLE“Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” —Jack Swigert It was April 13, 1970, and the crew of Apollo 13 was in trouble. “This is Houston. Say again, please.” An explosion in one of the oxygen tanks had crippled the spacecraft in mid-flight. “Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a Main B bus…
READ ARTICLE“You are only ever one decision away from a totally different life.” —Mark Batterson Forty-seven weeks ago I published the first post of this yearlong series on the power and potential of heightened self-awareness resulting in respect for all voices, beginning with one’s own. Next week I will publish the last post of this…
READ ARTICLE“If an apology is followed by an excuse or a reason, it means one is going to commit the same mistake again they just apologized for.” —Amit Kalantri The morning light summons silence and awe as I enter Wind Cave National Park. As I drive, I marvel at the natural beauty that surrounds me. In…
READ ARTICLEThis blog post is a reprint from an article Kevin recently wrote for The Maine Monitor, published October 24, 2021 ______ There’s a lot to learn from babies, one step at a time The CEO of Hancock Lumber notes that infants learn to walk with minimal training or coaching. Leaders can structure their organizations with…
READ ARTICLE“All this time I was finding myself and I didn’t know I was lost.” —Avicii, “Wake Me Up” How do you find and stay on your path? This is the question often pondered by self-actualizers for which I have acquired five personal tenets: You finding your path may have very little in common with me…
READ ARTICLE“Everyone is beautiful.” — Ariana Grande Jenny Edwards cleans and cares for the Hancock Lumber home office in Casco at night, after finishing her day job. I work an odd collection of hours, which brings me into the office at night once or twice a week. This is how Jenny and I met and then…
READ ARTICLE“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” —Buddha I was driving through Rapid City, South Dakota, when I saw him. Cresting the rolling hill in front of me appeared an all-white Ford pickup truck with a giant cross towering over the cab. Streamers…
READ ARTICLE“Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become the carrier of something that has been given to you from what we call the Muses—or, in biblical language, ‘God.’ This is not fancy, it is fact. Since…
READ ARTICLE“Everything you can imagine is real.” —Pablo Picasso We were driving through rural, agricultural Florida just north of Lake Okeechobee when I saw it. “What is that?” I said, removing my sunglasses for a second look. Several vehicles ahead, on a four-way section of downtown road, was an old yellow school bus with the…
READ ARTICLE“The most dangerous moment comes with victory.” —Napoleon Bonaparte Thursday, April 13, 1978 I’m twelve years old, in my bed on a school night. The only light in the room is coming from the illuminated station finder on my alarm clock radio. It’s Ned Martin’s last year calling the Red Sox, play by play, and…
READ ARTICLE“Liberty means responsibility. That’s why most men dread it.” —George Bernard Shaw It was six a.m. when I left Route 44 and passed through the veritable ghost town of Scenic, South Dakota, onto Bombing Range Road. I was on my way to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to have breakfast with my friend Rosie…
READ ARTICLE“Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and soul to it.” —Buddha Earlier this year I shared the following short message with everyone at Hancock Lumber: Hello! I was doing some work with another company in another industry yesterday. The subject of their “mission statement” was on the agenda….
READ ARTICLE“The problem with homelessness is not houselessness.” —Matt Haig Eugene, Oregon, is a city like no other. Nestled on the western edge of the Cascade Mountains, it’s surrounded by a valley of agricultural bounty. Sheep graze at the edge of the airport runway. The rivers flow and the flowers grow across a Disneyesque kingdom-like…
READ ARTICLE“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” —Soren Kierkegaard Catherine, speaking only in Lakota, conversed with the buffalo scattered across the high grasslands of what is today Wind Cave National Park in present-day South Dakota. The wind blew as it always does…
READ ARTICLE