May 26, 2008

May 26, 2008h in Process Theory, Sustainability, Visualizing by

Sttransformation - Back in the Flows of the I’m on the lip of change this week watching my energy shift from vision quest in the desert to the world of meetings. I’m leading a new finance team in a mid-sized company through an alignment process on Wednesday, then into a seminar called “Inventing the Future of Management” co-sponsored by the MLab (Gary Hamel’s new non-profit venture), McKinsey, and the London School of Business, Hamel’s long time base of operation. Gary’s invited a who’s who in management thinking to come to Half Moon Bay and ask why organizations can’t innovate, adapt, and engage more inventively. “We innovate with everything else – why not management?” he wonders. We’ve been helping get the agenda, templates, meeting infrastructure and everything else in place for several weeks now and it all comes to a head.

It’s been an interesting process re-engaging myself from sacred space back to day-to-day realities. It’s helped to begin each day in meditation, as I have since returning. That practice is deepening. And it’s been interesting to see with new eyes how fundamentally the world is not as it seems.

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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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Nov 13, 2006

Nov 13, 2006h in Family, Sustainability by

On Friday evening our youngest son Phil called from Portland to say his wife Emily was at Kaiser in labor, and that our new grandson was on his way! It took us about ten minutes to get tickets for a morning flight up (and one back that evening, for Susan was to chair her California Poets in the Schools Board meeting on Sunday).

After 23 hours of labor he stopped coming out. His 14″ diameter head wasn’t moving through, so the doctors did a C Section and there he was at 3:17pm Saturday.

And so the miracle of Reid Carlton Sibbet begins in the outer world. Here he is in all his 8lb. 9 oz glory.

The Miracle of New Life

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