Every morning my dog, Sita, and I take a long walk. It’s a special time for deep thoughts. There are many benefits I squeeze from our sunrise stroll. It gives me an opportunity before the demands of the day to work on what seems personally important, relevant to the particulars of my current circumstances. It’s […]
I discovered a tool that that is extraordinarily useful in my work with CEOs. This tool is called the Productive Zone of Disequilibrium, a term coined by Ronald Heifetz, co-developer of the Adaptive Leadership framework. Heifetz defines the productive zone of disequilibrium as the optimal range of distress within which the urgency in the system
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I love that little guy in the picture above with his goggles on. A dog who has a job to do is a happy dog. The article says that the best dogs for the job it outlines are the misfits, the ones who have too much energy, utterly obsessed with play beyond the human capacity
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If we are fortunate, we “develop the imaginary resources to go through life and find the soulful moments,” as my close friend Kelly said so eloquently during one of our recent weekly conversations. Above you see such a moment from my life, enjoying a fried chicken sandwich with my daughter, Ruchi. Mundane as it may
I do a lot of work on Grand Challenges – big, bold goals designed to change the world for the better – and they require alliances to create a unified thrust. All Grand Challenges require building a leadership strategy team – the inner circle – that will steer the initiative by working together to seize
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Every June my mother’s family has a reunion in Little Washington, Va. Usually, we have around 100, but this year was half that. The coronavirus has taken a large toll. Above you see the family tree stretched out over the wall of our picnic shelter with my wife, Laura, reading it and my daughter, Ruchi,
I am engaged in a large-scale change initiative with a major institution. The work reminds me of the success I’ve had helping other organizations – like the World Bank and Royal Dutch Shell – with culture change. The major lesson learned from all these works is that communities – groups of professionals who share a
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When I was 14 my father took me on a 2-week excursion into east Texas and Arkansas. We were living in Austin. One of our first stops was Davy Crockett National Forest. My dad loved to fish and camp, a real change from the native Brooklynite he was. I remember heading over to this spot
I’ve had the opportunity to preside over ten large-scale change initiatives in complex decentralized organizations, some of which span the globe. One of the things that I’ve come to learn is how organic really good change is. We live in the era of knowledge work, significantly different than the manufacturing of the industrial age. Knowledge
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My wife and I were talking to our contractor about some house remodeling and my wife said casually, “Our house is falling apart.” “It is not!” I snapped back. Of course, just an hour later the cabinet door above basically came off in my hands. Talk about an attitude adjustment! I tried several attempts at
