An Emerging
Leadership Philosophy
Two of these three stances are about you: Are you in it for the money? Are you in it to get ahead? Or are you in it to serve someone?
How will you measure your life? How can you know your life’s purpose? These are not questions that are easily answered.
Which came first: The concept or the details? It is easier for us to understand things when we are first presented with a concept and then supplied with details that allow us to better understand or improve the concept. It is as if “new information” has to somehow attach itself to something we already know in order for us to make sense of it.
In a recent article in The New Yorker magazine (June 23, 2014) Jill Lepore comments on the works of two of The Harvard Business School’s most prestigious professors, Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen. Porter coined the term “competitive advantage” in 1980, and Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation” in 1997.
When it comes to Systems thinking, most westerners are more comfortable with the “analysis” of the parts than with the “synthesis” of the whole. The opposite seems to be the case with most eastern cultures. Why is this true?
Implicit in this expression is the inference that our thoughts and our actions are not always in sync. In other words, we are not nearly as rational as we like to believe we are.
In his 1999 book, The Innovators Dilemma, Clayton Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation.” In economic terms, he explains how “traditional” organizations so often use new technologies in ways that sustain their already established ways and how they are so often “disrupted” by smaller, more entrepreneurial organizations that use the same technologies differently.
The concepts of quantum mechanics, relativity, and the like are difficult for the western mind to comprehend because we have so few metaphors, or “just-like references,” to help us understand. In his 1975 book, The Tao of Physics, Capra alternated his chapters between explanations of Modern Physics and Taoism.
Dr Russell Ackoff, (1919-2009) was widely recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on Systems Thinking. For more than 20 years he was professor of Systems Science at the Wharton School of business, and he was a life long friend of both Peter Drucker and W.E. Deming.
Harrison Owen coined the term and started the movement he calls “Open Space Technology.” It is not unlike what has been called a “Process Control Environment “ in The Sys-Tao Way, and it is the antithesis of what was referred to as a “Command and Control Structure.”