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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Leadership
One leadership style that is both praised and criticized is the “fixer.” When the situation looks mostly hopeless, we need someone who can minimize the damage and help restore some level of status quo. Yet no organization desires to be in that situation and certainly not to live in that state of affairs. Fixers excel at identifying root causes and mobilizing resources rapidly to help people and organizations move to a position where they can begin to play an active role in their rescue.
Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert in When Helping Hurts, illustrate the devastating effects when poverty alleviation…
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Leadership
Although I have enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell’s writings over the years, my initial reaction to his latest book, Talking to Strangers, was a bit lukewarm based completely on the title. It sounded like a self-help book for introverts. But after reading a few reviews, I realized the book had something to offer to the leadership conversation. Gladwell adds his voice to the chorus of writers reminding us we are not as competent as we think we are in some very important aspects of communication and decision making.
In Gladwell style, he illustrates his points with stories from the world of espionage,…
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