The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : To the woman warrior I did not know.
Leadership
A person is a person through other persons
“Ubuntu […] speaks of the very essence of being human. Continue reading
Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!
Sometimes, it is our task to find out how much music we can make with what we have left
Yitzhak Perlman, the great violinist, was playing in New York. Yitzhak Perlman was crippled by polio as a young child, so the bottom part of his body doesn’t work well and he wears these very prominent leg braces and comes on in crutches, in a very painful, slow way, hauling himself across the stage. Then he sits down and, very carefully, unbuckles the leg braces and lays them down, puts down his crutches, and then picks up his violin. So, this night the audience had watched him slowly, painfully, walk across the stage; and he began to play. And, suddenly, there was a loud noise in the hall that signaled that one of his four strings on his violin had just snapped.
There is a place called, “beyond hope and fear”
What if, at the end of our lives, we die having watched destruction and not been able to create any good effect?
What, really, is available to us if we can’t save the world? What do we fund our work for? Where do we gain energy if we don’t believe that we’re going to be successful? How can we do our work without hope that we will succeed? Continue reading
What Is Worth Doing
We often avoid the question of whether something is worth doing by going straight to the question “How do we do it?“ In fact, when we believe that something is definitely not worth doing, we are particularly eager to start asking How? We can look at what is worth doing at many different levels: As an individual I can wonder whether I can be myself and do what I want and still make a living. For an organization I can ask for whose sake does this organization exist and does it exist for any larger purpose than to survive and be economically successful? As a society, have we replaced a sense of community and civic engagement for economic well being and the pursuit of our private ambition? Continue reading
What is the transformation in me that is required?
No one is going to change as a result of our desires. In fact, they will resist our efforts to change them simply due to the coercive aspect of the interaction. Continue reading
Pursuing What matters Most
There is something in the persistent question How? that expresses each person’s struggle between having confidence in their capacity to live a life of purpose and yielding to the daily demands of being practical. Continue reading
Clarity propels an organisation
Not occasional clarity but pervasive, 24-hour, in-your-face, take-no-prisoners clarity. Most people never perceive that this is lacking in their organisation, but 90% of the time it is. Just open a few random emails, activate your “brutal-vision”, and read. The muddying messages are rampant. If people were brutally honest in their emails, the time we spend sorting through our in-boxes would surely decrease by half. Continue reading
What Makes a Person Shine?
What separates people who feel fulfilled from those who suffer with regret? Here’s a hint: it isn’t money in the bank, fame, trophies, or rank, as much as those may matter. Many people don’t finish first but nonetheless achieve greatness and long will be remembered, while many who do finish first will never be called great and will soon tumble into oblivion. Continue reading
ONE TUSK 