Hi-tech pioneer WL Gore is weathering the crunch well, says CEO Terri Kelly, because it is mercifully free of bureaucracy. In most companies, turning down the founder and chief executive’s request to look after a pet project would be a career-stopper for a young engineer on her first assignment.  But WL Gore and Associates is not most companies. And Terri Kelly, the engineer in question who...

In December 2006, while developing a leadership program for Airbus, I met an executive whose youngest son was born without hearing. Through this man I became familiar with the silent culture of deaf people.  As I immersed myself in their visual, intensely expressive language, I realized that through their “handicap,” deaf people had developed certain communication skills more thoroughly...

We live in a hectic, 24/7 society, full of power-walking workaholics where slowing down is for losers.  One recent survey by the consumer research firm OTX found that many of us use high-tech gadgets to get 31 hours of work out of a 24-hour day. So what could be less relevant to the working day than the “slow” movement?  This came into being in Italy 20 years ago when fast-food chain...

Business leaders who want to retain and leverage talent and position ourselves for success in the new business landscape, listen up.  More workers want to be fully engaged, and they want a new model through which they can express themselves while making a contribution that matters.  This demand for engagement is driven by five trends that are dramatically reshaping the business context: * Technology,...

You have many options to choose from when you respond to others.  You can respond from fear and judgment, your past experiences or your expectations and beliefs.  Or you can respond from detachment, unconditional love, peace and joy.  Each interaction you have with another presents you with an opportunities to choose from which place you will respond.  And what you respond from will be reflected...

Some people have such severe personality flaws that they are unfit to be managers and end up causing tremendous damage when they are put into positions of authority. Dr Iain McCormick, managing director of the Executive Coaching Centre, says there are several different types of bad managers or ‘derailers’, the worst of which is the office psychopath.  “These are people who are not...

There is a simple structural dynamic that dominates most human beings, and that is the avoidance of conflict. Most of us do not want to feel the emotional stress of having to confront others. Most of us do not want to confront ourselves when reality is different from what we thought it was. Rather than address head on those things that need addressing, we develop a lifetime of compensating strategies....

One of the great frustrations encountered by today’s most powerful people is that the power they’ve worked so hard to amass may just stop working. It isn’t that they could lose what they have – it’s that it simply may no longer matter to the world.  Consider:  With 90% market shares in operating systems and applications, Microsoft could once use its dominance to crush competitors or simply...

Excerpted from Leadership and the New Science, by Margaret Wheatley I am constantly creating the world – evoking it, not discovering it – as I participate in its many interactions. We cannot know anything about what is happening to something if we are not looking at it and, stranger yet, nothing has happened until we observe it. Reality emerges from our processes of obser­vation, from...

by Harrison Owen, founder of Open Space Technology: The experiment, of course, is that ridiculously simple way to elegant gatherings, Open Space Technology.  As you may know, the creation of OST was not a labor intensive activity. In fact it appeared in my mind on the strength of two martinis in the time it took to drink them. That was 23 years ago, and in the intervening period millions of people...