“…Who is the enemy? Who is holding back more rapid movement to the better society that is reasonable and possible with available resources? Who is responsible for the mediocre performance of so many of our institutions? Continue reading
transformation
A joke is a serious thing!
Many years ago, Arthur Koestler wrote about three human responses, the HA!HA! reaction, the AHA! reaction and the AAH…! reaction. He suggested that we laugh when we unexpectedly see the same thing in two different frames of reference. Continue reading
What is a well-conceived vision ?
” Vision has become one of the most overused – and least understood – words in the language.The word vision conjures up all kinds of images. We think of outstanding achievement. We think of deeply held values that bond people in a society together.We think of audacious, exhilarating goals that galvanise people. We think of something eternal – the underlying reasons for an organisation’s existence. We think of something that reaches inside us and pulls out our best efforts.We think of the dreams of what we want to be. And therein lies a problem.All of us know vision is important, but what exactly is it?” Continue reading
Trust and shared responsibility built in difficult times carry over into the future.
“…All change involves risk, and many people commit only if they have confidence in those advocating the change. Continue reading
The need for acceptance, understanding and education……
“If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following: Continue reading
The Parable of the Unsolicited Gift…..
“The crucial point is that in creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark… The archaeological evidence indicates that the earliest representative of homo sapiens – the Cro-Magnon man who enters the scene a hundred thousand years ago or earlier – was already endowed with a brain which in size and shape is indistinguishable from ours. But however paradoxical it sounds, he hardly made any use of that luxury organ. He remained an illiterate cave dweller and for millennium after millennium, went on manufacturing spears, bows and arrows of the same primitive type, while the organ which was to take man to the moon was already there, ready for use, inside his skull. Thus the evolution of the brain overshot the mark by a time factor of astronomical magnitude. Continue reading
Frog in a pot of hot water…..
“..If you place a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately try to scramble out. But if you place the frog in room temperature water, and don’t scare him, he’ll stay put. Continue reading
Obliquity
” one key reason why the presidents of large corporations do not control the United States is that they do not control their own corporations…when implied organisational skill and power are deployed and the desired direct effect flows, all that we have witnessed is the same kind of sequence as to what we observed when a clergyman is fortunate enough to pray for rain just before the unpredicted end of a drought…”
– Alasdair MacIntyre
Full Effort is Full Victory
Gandhi wanted so deeply to help the world that he dedicated his life to siphoning every trace of self-interest out of his heart and mind, leaving them pure, radiantly healthy, and free to love. It took him nearly twenty years to gain such control of his thinking process, but with every day of demanding effort he discovered a little more of the deep resources that are within us all: unassuming leadership, eloquence, and an endless capacity for selfless service.
How Change Doesn’t Happen
Picture an egg. Day after day, it sits there. No one pays attention to it. No one notices it. Certainly no one takes a picture of it or puts it on the cover of a celebrity-focused business magazine. Then one day, the shell cracks and out jumps a chicken.
All of a sudden, the major magazines and newspapers jump on the story: “Stunning Turnaround at Egg!” and “The Chick Who Led the Breakthrough at Egg!” From the outside, the story always reads like an overnight sensation — as if the egg had suddenly and radically altered itself into a chicken.
Now picture the egg from the chicken’s point of view.
While the outside world was ignoring this seemingly dormant egg, the chicken within was evolving, growing, developing — changing. From the chicken’s point of view, the moment of breakthrough, of cracking the egg, was simply one more step in a long chain of steps that had led up to that moment. Granted, it was a big step — but it was hardly the radical transformation that it looked like from the outside.
It’s a silly analogy — but then our conventional way of looking at change is no less silly. Everyone looks for the “miracle moment” when “change happens.” But ask the good-to-great executives when change happened. They cannot pinpoint a single key event that exemplified their successful transition.
– – Jim Collins author of ‘Good to Great’
ONE TUSK 