Ideas

  • Organizational Quicksand, Part 2: Getting Unstuck

    Organizational Quicksand, Part 2: Getting Unstuck

    Last week’s blog post introduced differences in the way organizations turn thinking into action. I organized the distinctions by contrasting two attributes of an organization’s culture: The organization’s tolerance for ambiguity and the organization’s preferred influence style. In this post, I want to flesh out the distinctions a bit more and then consider how becoming… Read more

  • Organizational Quicksand: Four modes of thinking together they may be holding you back

    Organizational Quicksand: Four modes of thinking together they may be holding you back

    Getting stuck in the way we are thinking is like finding ourselves in quicksand; applying our habits and routines just makes things worse. I want to describe four categories of organizational quicksand. Each category represents a routine mode of translating thinking into action. The four modes emerge from comparing and contrasting two dimensions of an… Read more

  • Uncovering Your Client’s Requirements: Four questions for connecting services and solutions to wants and needs

    Uncovering Your Client’s Requirements: Four questions for connecting services and solutions to wants and needs

    Changing the way we refer to things says a lot about our changing mindsets. For example, our organizations used to “train” people, now we “develop talent” through “blended learning experiences.” Companies that once employed “salespeople” responsible for closing deals, now have “business development teams” that form relationships with customers and clients. Our changing descriptions of… Read more

  • Leadership versus Heroism

    Leadership versus Heroism

    Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns Driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.1   The Trump presidency has raised some difficult questions for some of us who study and teach leadership. Most of my colleagues share values and beliefs that… Read more

  • Love Encounters Suffering: Questions for being with

    Love Encounters Suffering: Questions for being with

    The shocking deaths by suicide this week (two celebrities among the estimated 860 deaths by suicide every week in the U.S.) bring to mind Martin Buber’s powerful distinction between “experiencing” the world (the mode of I-it) and “encountering” the world (the mode of I-Thou). In the “I-it” mode, we are separate from what we experience,… Read more

  • Question Authority

    Question Authority

    Thanks in part to Steve Bannon and my fondness for double entendres, the slogan of my youth has become my new job title: Jay Gordon Cone, Question Authority. For the purpose of my job title, “question” is a noun. I had been resisting business cards for my new venture, Unstuck Minds. I never know what… Read more