We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the Secret sits in the middle and knows. – Robert Frost Coaching is a magic that is born in the vibrating powerful safe space between two people who have allowed themselves to be vulnerable. It reminds me of the teambuilding game when someone has to hold… Read More
Narrative Leadership
Yesterday PWN Amsterdam organized a great event about Narrative Leadership: The art of speaking so others can hear you. The speaker, David Drake, an experienced American coach and the creator of narrative coaching answered the questions: Why narrative leadership is more than storytelling How to use the iMAP frame to communicate better How to use narrative design to structure your message How… Read More
On Change
Do people really change? I believe we all have asked ourselves this question at some point in our lives. The “paradox of success”, according to Charles Handy, occurs because we need to change before we have to change. However, “when things are going well we feel no reason to change.” There are two ways people… Read More
You really can’t be too rich…
How much money do you need to be happy? What do you sacrifice to earn more money? At what amount would you say “I have enough”? As it turned out according to a recent research, there is no satiation point when it comes to money. So the answer to the questions above is obvious – we will never… Read More
A Constant Sense of Priority
Bob Cannan, the CEO of Eagle Productivity Solutions , says that One of the worst feelings that high achievers have — which is self-defeating — is that they have to get everything done, and that’s really the one thing that breaks a lot of ambitious people. [… ]The one thing that I try to advise… Read More
On reading and leading and heroic leadership
Will Rogers once said that there are three kinds of men: The ones that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to touch an electric fence. Most of us would agree that becoming successful involves a lot of electric fence touching, methaphorically speaking, and being an alert observer of… Read More
Information Overload
I feel overloaded with information and I admit I cannot catch up even with the things I really want to follow. Don’t get me wrong – I love information and I can’t live without research. However, what bothers me is that there is almost no time left to THINK. To digest what we read. To… Read More
This is water
Start the weekend with a great piece of wisdom – watch one of the most honest, provoking commencement speeches ever. It was delivered by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College, three years before David took his own life. https://dotsub.com/media/6b8cc93f-3b53-486b-a1ce-025ffe6c9c52/embed/ “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important… Read More
Nothing Fails Like Success
Weekly business advice: Be aware of the quiet, slow danger of active inertia There is no better time to talk about the term active inertia than today, in the age of uncertainty and disruption. According to Donald Sull, a Professor of Management Practice at the London Business School, “active inertia is the condition of doing what you’ve always… Read More
Start the New Year without a crappy list
*this blogpost was for 2013, but still highly relevant! Today we whispered wonderful blessings to our beloved ones and secretly we all thought of at least one thing we wish for ourselves in 2013. Reality is we don’t have a hell of an idea what is going to happen to us, which makes it both… Read More
Some Thoughts On Leadership
I am fed up with articles which present leadership as an easy effort and an overnight success – just google the word leadership and you will see 458,000,000 search results. To paraphrase a famous quote “leaders are like ghosts, everybody talks about them, but few have seen them”. There are millions of articles insulting our… Read More
Modern Management Methods Conference
Can we make our knowledge workers 50x more productive in the 21st Century? At the beginning of October I attended the Modern Management Methods Conference (#lknl13) organized by LeanKanban Netherlands and the Lean-Kanban University. It was a great event that inspired me to learn more about agile, kanban and lean. In the complex world we… Read More
Can Leadership Be Taught?
Two days ago I came back from a fairytale place called Windermere where I spent 5 days attending an Open Leadership Program organized by Impact International. I have been following Impact’s work for a year, so I was quite excited about the opportunity to participate in their program. Below is nothing but my opinion of how… Read More
Smartest guy in the room?
Worse than surrounding yourself with stupid people is surrounding yourself with smart people and not letting them act. Worse than not asking for their opinion, is asking for it and not hearing it, because you are always right. There are two things we should do: hire the best and get out of the way. When… Read More