transformation
real thing or mere reflection of self…
Sufi mystic Shibli was asked, “Who guided you in the Path?”
He said: “A dog. One day I saw him, almost dead with thirst, standing by the water’s edge. Every time he looked at his reflection in the water he was frightened, and withdrew, because he thought it was another dog.
“Finally, such was his necessity, he cast away fear and leapt into the water; at which the ‘other dog’ vanished.“The dog found that the obstacle, which was himself, the barrier between him and what he sought, melted away.
“In this same way my own obstacle vanished, when I knew that it was what I took to be my own self. And my Way was first shown to me by the behavior of a dog.”
Cultural Leadership : actions that midwives the future
“…. cultural leadership is distinct from political and administrative leadership. While political leaders primarily make rules and administrative leaders primarily enforce rules, cultural leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Mother Theresa find principled and imaginative ways to transgress those rules that inhibit the emergence of cultural sovereignty and creativity.
Back end or Heart of House?
Writer William Gibson once famously said that the ‘The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.’ I worry more that the past is here—it’s just so evenly distributed that we can’t get to the future.
— Paul Kedrosky
A few years ago, we facilitated an event with a group of luxury car dealers in a Four Seasons hotel. They were all the owners or General Managers of the dealerships: wealthy, shrewd businesspeople with a track record of success going back a decade or more. They had come to the event to learn from other luxury and service businesses. They were exposed to world-class stimuli over the two days: leading-edge technology retailing, high-end customer service, the latest and greatest in travel and hospitality. And yet one of the most illuminating conversations came after a visit to the laundry.
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Innovation is born from the interaction between constraint and vision
Constraints can actually speed development. For instance, we often can get a sense of just how good a new concept is if we only prototype for a single day or week. Or we’ll keep team size to three people or fewer. By limiting how long we work on something or how many people work on it, we limit our investment. In the case of the Toolbar beta, several key features (custom buttons, shared bookmarks) were tried out in under a week. In fact, during the brainstorming phase, we came up with about five times as many “key features.” Most were discarded after a week of prototyping. Since only 1 in every 5 to 10 ideas works out, the strategy of limiting the time we have to prove that an idea works allows us to try out more ideas, increasing our odds of success. Continue reading
Our indefatigable pursuit of pleasure keeps us doing some awfully strange things…..
One of my favorite stories comes from the Sufi tradition of mystical Islam. It is a tale that tells us exactly what we will have to face if we endeavor to walk the path of desire.
A man sits in the center of a Middle Eastern marketplace crying his eyes out, a platter of peppers spilled out on the ground before him.
Stuck
Sit down and be quiet.
You are drunk. And this is the edge of the roof.
Rumi, Sufi mystic, poet, 13th century
It’s unfortunate that life isn’t about constant progress and unending success. Life is circular in form—cycles of light and darkness, success and failure, order and chaos. Seldom do we appreciate the necessity for these opposites. We’d rather just have it be successful and wonderful all the time. But we all have to pass through life’s cycles, gracefully or not. When we personally are confronted by the downside of these cycles, such as when we get stuck, how do we respond?
Not to tolerate the intolerant……
“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Continue reading
Lets Curate….
You don’t make a great museum by putting all the art in the world into a single room.
That’s a warehouse. Continue reading
ONE TUSK 