Feb 17, 2010

Feb 17, 2010h in Graphic Facilitation, Innovation, Organization Development, Visual Leadership books, Visualizing by

This post links you to a video about my presentation on Visual Meetings at a recent TEDxSOMA event at the ParisSOMA loft, South of Market Street in San Francisco. ParisSOMA is a shared workspace for young entrepreneurs, very much in the spirit of the TED events. Its motto is “ideas worth sharing.” My Parisian college Meryem Le Saget introduced me to the sponsor Clement Alterseco, President of FaberNovell in Paris, several months ago and it led to the invitation.

My own ideas, formed over the 38 years I’ve been a visual practitioner, are condensing into a book for Wiley & Sons on the subject that will come out this summer. This 10-minute fly-over is a fast-paced review of what feels like a real revolution in how we communicate in organizations.

Feb 14, 2007

Feb 14, 2007h in Innovation, Sustainability by

Nature Deficit Disorder?I recently read Richard Louv, author of The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder. This appeared in an interview in The Sun, Sy Safransky’s remarkable magazine that publishes original writing and essays about our most important issues as reflected in people’s daily lives.

As a journalist, Louv is writing to raise our collective awareness about the alarming decline in American young people’s direct experiences with anything wild or natural. The Sun interviewer asked Louv, “Have you talked much to children themselves?”

Louv replied, “A few months ago I was asked to give a talk at a nearby high school. I expected twenty kids to show up, but there were more than two hundred… I talked for an hour, and they listened intently. And it wasn’t because I’m a great speaker: I’m not. It was about something else.

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Nov 25, 2006

Nov 25, 2006h in Community Building, Innovation, Leading Change, Service Learning, Sustainability by
The Time is Ripe for Social Entrepreneurs

Coro Alums Using GS Tools

I found myself in Aptos, CA recently at an alumni gathering of Coro, the leadership training organization through which I got my start professionally. It stirred my thinking like an ice cream beater on a hot summer afternoon, and the results are exciting me almost as much as the ice cream I can remember from those days long ago.

I’m beginning to believe that our country can reinvent itself in the civic arena much as we did in the early 1900s, after the very uninvolved 1890s when millions were coping with the industrial revolution and the isolation and confusion in the new cities. Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Communities, made this appeal to me several years ago, but I wasn’t optimistic then. I sense a quickening now.

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