Leadership
Anger seems to be a common emotion these days. If you aren’t angry about something you must not be paying attention. It is hard to watch a news broadcast and not feel like things are going in the wrong direction and it must be somebody’s fault. Who should receive the blame depends on who is doing the talking. While there is great difference of opinion on who is responsible, all sides share something in common, they are confident they know who to blame.
One result of this confident finger pointing is that the most significant problems never get solved. And…
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Leadership
Distractions have been around since the beginning of time. No matter what period of history you lived in, there was always the temptation to do something other than work. You didn’t have to live in a super connected high tech world to find chatting with your neighbor, daydreaming, or taking a nap more appealing in the moment than completing the task. However, it does seem that all those amazing sources of information at your fingertips and all your social media connections ready to converse have taken distractions to a new level.
Some observers and researchers suggest we are rewiring our…
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Leadership
One of the many memorable lines from the classic Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is “Youth is wasted on the wrong people.” The line is delivered by an older man watching a young couple struggling to find the next step in their awkward romantic dance. As we get older and our ideas about the right way to do things become firmly entrenched, we sometimes forget how those ideas were formed. It is easy to believe you simply always thought that way. But if you think back carefully to those formative years of university and early adult life, you…
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Leadership
An important characteristic of wisdom is recognizing wisdom in the thoughts and actions of others. Sometimes we have trouble doing that when the wisdom comes from outside our community and looks different from our “brand” of wisdom. This can create barriers to finding integrative solutions that require us to broaden our horizons and embrace ideas that don’t easily align with our existing perspectives.
Working with people from other cultures can seem a bit bewildering at times. You can often find yourself thinking and sometimes exclaiming a decision seems to make “no sense.” Many times, once we understand the decision making…
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Leadership
Logic seems like it would be the great bridge to solving every problem. We often think of logic as a transcendent truth that overcomes all emotions, prejudices, and even experiences. “You can’t argue with logic.” The problem turns out to be that logic is much more personal than objective. In fact, because logic is in the eye of the beholder, it is often the barrier rather than the bridge.
This is certainly true in working across cultures. Culture has been defined as “the way we do things around here.” Generally, the approaches that seemed to yield the best results over…
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