Meeting Marshall Goldsmith

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One of the speaker at OD this week was Marshall Goldsmith, one of the Ken Blanchard guys (and, he said, the father of Kelly from Survivor Africa, a show I must have missed). I had meant to go to another session, but I was talking as is my wont and just decided to stay where I was. It happened to …

Positive Psychology: David Cooperrider’s talk on Appreciative Inquiry

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RE: David Cooperrider’s talk on Appreciative Inquiry at Linkage’s Organizational Summit 2003 in Chicago. Some interesting things I took away from his very interesting talk: Healthy patients (ones that would survive) had 2x as many positive images of the future as negative images. They weren’t all positive, just 2/3 positive in images of the future. Unhealthy patients had a balance …

OD SUMMIT 2003: Talk by Peter Block

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Peter Block had a weird plenary talk this morning. Although let’s face it, this is the reason that I signed up for this conference in the first place. He talked a lot about “having a conversation that we’ve never had before” in business. Our problem, he says, often stems from being stuck in the same conversation again and again. We …

The Great Ravenna Boulevard Sinkhole, 1957. Seattle Municipal Archives (CC BY 2.0)

Risk Aversion and Risk Taking

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We are basically risk averse. Most of the people that you think are going to be risk-averse, are. For example, older workers, workers with seniority, and those in stereotypically risk-averse industries (e.g., retail banking) are more risk averse than others where other variables are constant. INFOSEC got most of its people from banking, and most from a very conservative bank …