June 2003 archive

The Mob Has Spoken! My life sucks!

Once again, the unruly mob that has been such a voice in all things weighty in my life has spoken with a loud voice to let me know exactly what is on their mind. With the final tally almost in and the convention in an uproar, I have decided to let the mob sway my decisions! Hear now, here now, how now, let the voice of the people speak!

And with one mighty voice, lifted to heaven they shout out their decision, they raise all alarm with their great and terrible sound, the voice of the unruly, unkept, "we're a lot smarter than you are so shut up and do what we say" mob -- their voice is undeniable! How can I deny their call? Where can I go to escape their oppressive noise, noise, noise! "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.'"

-- manasclerk

Jerry Sternin's Positive Deviance talk

At Linkage's Organizational Summit 2003 in Chicago.

OK, so I met Mr. Sternin during an earlier lecture. I was doing the big-time consultant show off thing, and he was real gracious not to just tell me I was full of shit. Which I was. Here I was, trying to "look good" in front of someone I thought was just this guy, when he's the real deal, someone who has made a real difference in the world. (He'll say it was really a team effort, but Sternin is the leading force behind Vietnamese children not starving to death.) And he was so incredibly gracious about my conceit. If that's not a kick in the mouth, I don't know what is. The fake is all puffed up while the real deal is sitting there as an interested participant, one amongst equals.

Anyways, he gave a great four-hour seminar on positive deviance where most of the people didn't get it, partly because we are so focused on providing our own solutions to our clients instead of finding solutions within them.

Meeting Marshall Goldsmith

One of the speaker at OD this week was Marshall Goldsmith, one of the Ken Blanchard guys (and, he said, the father of Kelly from Survivor Africa, a show I must have missed). I had meant to go to another session, but I was talking as is my wont and just decided to stay where I was. It happened to be a table on the front and I need to be up close to pay any attention at all. I get a good deal of my information from the speaker's facial expressions. But I had no idea who Marshall Goldsmith was, and was only marginally interested in executive coaching. Apparently, some rag named him the best executive coach and another one of the top ten consultants. So, worthwhile regardless, eh?

My brother's response to finding out that I had been in a Marshall seminar and that he had consequently come up to talk to me was "You met Marshall Goldsmith? Do you know how much people pay for that?!"

Very cool.

Positive Psychology: David Cooperrider's talk on Appreciative Inquiry

RE: David Cooperrider's talk on Appreciative Inquiry at Linkage's Organizational Summit 2003 in Chicago.

Some interesting things I took away from his very interesting talk:

• Healthy patients (ones that would survive) had 2x as many positive images of the future as negative images. They weren't all positive, just 2/3 positive in images of the future.


• Unhealthy patients had a balance between positive and negative images of the future. They weren't entirely pessimistic, just balanced.


• Cooperrider says that within an organization, the image of the future resides within the people, around the water cooler


• Mentioned Drucker on the role of leadership in change: Create an alignment of strengths and make their weaknesses irrelevant(!)


• Fredrickson's work on positive emotions: of the 30,000+ psych articles surveyed from peer-reviewed journals, only a few hundred were on positive emotions


• Fredrickson & Branigan, 2002; Fredrickson & Levenson, 1998: I'll have to read these articles for more on this positive emotion idea


• Positive emotions can undo lingering negative emotional arousal. As people link positive emotions, begins the work of undoing negative emotional affects.


• The more we can cultivate joy, hope, delight, the more we create an incompatibility with old ways


• "Triggering upward spirals of well-being" but I think that came from Fredrickson


• Our consulting is centered around an organization's problems: it is a small step from "Our organization has problems" to "Our organization is a problem"
  ASIDE: I wonder if this is the problem with the issues with male psychological characteristics like aggression and risk-taking.


• "The seeds of change are in the very first questions."

It should go very well with Creative Deviance, too.

OD SUMMIT 2003: Talk by Peter Block

Peter Block had a weird plenary talk this morning. Although let's face it, this is the reason that I signed up for this conference in the first place.

He talked a lot about "having a conversation that we've never had before" in business. Our problem, he says, often stems from being stuck in the same conversation again and again. We need a new conversation if we are going to move forward. (There was a really interesting article about conversations about strategy that was in Management Information Sciences -- I think -- that seems relevant. I'll try to update sometime with the link.)

Thank God, it's over

Three days is all either party can stand of each other. Three days with my in-laws drove me nuts.

And them nuts.

At least no one killed anyone. That I know of.