Image via Wikipedia Think about the last time you worked with a consultant in your organization: looking back at what the consultant did and said, were there any specific behaviors that surprised you? Did she do something that you and the faculty were not already capable of doing? If they did something new, is the […]
Tag: education
How important is contextual knowledge for process consultants in business settings?
Image via Wikipedia am interested in knowing in what two or three adjectives you would use to describe the essential nature of the environment that you operate in for your business. What do you consider to be the most important environmental influences on the system that is your business? Is your environment something that your […]
Planning considerations for “insider” consultants
Image via Wikipedia as an inside consultant with considerable knowledge of the status quo, what kinds of procedures or checklists or attitudes do you think are necessary to ensure that we are taking a fresh look at a well-known situation to find root causes? How dangerous is it for the organization to have OD consultants […]
Information technology: integrating IT into Strategic planning
Image by Chris Pirillo via Flickr Your information technology department MUST be part of your strategic planning process for our value can be created and multiplied2 reasons: 1. they have possibilities and enablers that may suggest new ways that your value can be created,d explanded, multplied, leveraged 2. if they don’t know where you are […]
A reflection on entreprenurial spirit and stability operations, and engagement areas in nation-building
Image via Wikipedia Thoughts while TDY: action learning: a discipline/focus on actionable learning (see Lewin, Schein…) Planning: we seek to understand so that we can act Design: we act, iteratively, on the basis of fundamental principles, in order to learn we live life forwards, but understand it looking backwards we build nations and stabilize societies […]
A reflection on charismatic leadership
Image via Wikipedia I am naturally skeptical about charismatic leaders, but I have seen its power in action. Just before GEN Petraeus left our college to take command in Iraq he gathered faculty and students in our large auditorium, which seats 2500. He spoke in a very relaxed manner, hardly the tone you might expect […]
Reflecting on self-directed leadership in a military college environment (an action research approach)
Image via Wikipedia The purpose of this assignment is reflect upon my learning through this course and to describe what I am doing to provide for the development of leadership capabilities in those who look to me for direction and guidance. My professional work centers on preparing Army organizational leaders for a world of complexity […]
A reflection on Hunt’s “Leadership: A new synthesis” (1996)
Image via Wikipedia remember that Hunt is writing his synthesis in 1996, and he comes from the leadership discipline, not education or cognitive neuroscience. He is good when it comes to synthesizing existing literature, but his excursions into the future of “what-if” are not very convincing. There has been a lot of important work done […]
education, leadership, biodiversity and the limits of reason
Image via Wikipedia at the other end of the time scale from the doctoral programs, i think the right model to use is that of bio-diversity. It’s not “survival of the fittest” in the wild, it is extinction of the unfit & toleration of the “good enough” which promotes a broad gene pool. A broad […]
A reflection on self-directed education and doctoral programs
Image via Wikipedia my sense of the self directed learning challenge is that the role of the professor/mentor should include modelling the kind of behavior that we hope to inspire in others, which includes the vulnerability aspect of all good research: that is, that the inquiry is in the middle of the uncertainty we are […]