The cobbler’s children go unshod. — Old Russian proverb I’ve told you for years (if you’ve been paying attention) that you can’t force people wanting what you have to offer. That you can’t change certain parts of who you are. That when people don’t want what you have to offer — either due to working below your worklevel, fighting …
Be Careful What You Change: The Law of Unintended Consequences
In your personality, tweaking one thing will change several others. Did you ever think that you could learn something about your career and personal development from chicken breeding? ‘Tis true! Read on, true believer: [Chicken] Breeders working over several decades chose the most productive birds to reproduce, resulting in white leghorns that each year can lay 300 to 320 of …
Recent Reading
List of what I have been reading so I can keep track. Possibly less than interesting.
Note: Basic Assumption MeNess (ba M)
Brief quotation from an 1996 article by by Lawrence, Bain, and Gould (“The Fifth Basic Assumption”, Free Associations Volume 6, Part 1 [No. 37]: 2855)
Elliott Jaques’s “Intellectual Odyssey”
Douglas Kirsner of Deakin University spoke with Elliott Jaques before he died, and wrote up the results from the perspective of another psychoanalyst. Jaques abandoned psychoanalysis but would later refer to that as perhaps going overboard. It’s an interesting read for those of you who are interested in what he thought of things at the end of his life. This …
New Church Model Isn’t: Multisite Is Regurgitation of the Model They Hated
This continues my examination of American Evangelicals’ organization of their churches, both lay and clergy. One of the big things in the Evangelical world, a real “game changer” they say, is the multisite church. You’ll hear them say things like “twenty years ago, the Holy Spirit was moving and doing a big thing. And people listening to Him said, ‘It’s …
Accomplishment Does Not Equal Success
One of the mistakes I made early on in my career was to believe that if I had some great accomplishments that I would gain success, including things like money and community respect. This is clearly false, and I’ve recently had a series of communications with an organizational thinker that confirms it. But first let’s look at some of the …
Depressed About Work? Positivity May Not Work
Job hunters often get depressed from their hunt, and it’s probably even worse in a stagnant, depressed economy like we’re in today. One of the coping techniques that misguided but well-meaning people teach them is to use Positive Thinking. People regularly use these techniques and believe strongly that they are effective.
Nice, except that it will often backfire. [more]
Transitions To Higher Levels Mean Having To Build New Habits, And That’s Hard
When you transition from one work level to another, you have to learn new ways of being. These will be enshrined in habit but letting go of old ways hurts.
Free Management Films By Wilfred Brown
The GO Society has revamped its website. It looks great, and they’ve put up some great new materials. The Wilfred Brown management films, Exploration in Management, is now available in a new format (and a new link). I’ve excerpted from these before and think that they are probably the clearest way to understand Brown’s particular point of view. They also …