Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Archives for April 2011

Find that magic spot

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Ken Robinson on Passion from The School of Life on Vimeo.

Ken Robinson believes that everyone is born with extraordinary capability. So what happens to all that talent as we bump through life, getting by, but never realizing our true potential?

For most of us the problem isn’t that we aim too high and fail – it’s just the opposite – we aim too low and succeed.

We need to find that magic spot where our natural talent meets our personal passion. This means we need to know ourselves better. Whilst we content ourselves with doing what we’re competent at, but don’t truly love, we’ll never excel. And, according to Ken, finding purpose in our work is essentially to knowing who we really are.

Get ready to unleash your inner fervor as Ken takes to our pulpit to inspire you to follow your passion.

Sir Ken Robinson is a leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources, working with governments and the world’s leading cultural organizations. Born in Liverpool, he was Director of The Arts Project (1985-89), and is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Warwick. He was knighted in 2003 for his contribution to education and the arts. Recent publications include Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative (2001) and The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything (2009).

This secular sermon took place at Conway Hall on Sunday 13 March 2011

Succeed Through Service

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“Ritz-Carlton residences and destination clubs, take part in Succeed Through Service partnering with local schools and youth organizations worldwide, many of which work closely with children facing economic, social or personal challenges. After just two years, The Ritz-Carlton has helped over 6,000 youngsters around the world. “Succeed Through Service focuses on giving young people a bright future through life-skills training, career exploration, and service-learning projects,” says Sue Stephenson, vice president, community footprints. “As the name suggests, Succeed Through Service is all about helping young people thrive and inspiring them do their best.”

Read the full article here

CEO -> Chief Emotions Officer

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Chip Conly writes in the Huffington Post:

In this knowledge era, execution is all about people: how to harness and inspire the potential of those we work with. And, at the heart of people are our emotions, the mysterious internal weather that either propels or penalizes us. After 24 years of being a CEO, I’ve come to realize that the best amongst us are truly Chief Emotions Officers as we are the “emotional thermostats” for our organizations with studies showing that a typical leader has 50-70% influence over the work climate of their team.

Read the full post here

Perfection or Differentiation?

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These two graphs may look quite harmless, but actually together they illustrate a dilemma that faces many hospitality and service companies today.

Diminishing returns


The blue curve illustrates the phenomenon know as diminishing returns. Well known in the sports world but also observed in the business world. In short it is the experience you have when you start out on something and relatively quickly get a sense of progress – but once you have dealt with the ‘low hanging fruit’ it gets harder and harder and you need to put in more and more effort but at the same time you are getting less and less in return.
Shaving 1/10 of a second off the world record takes a lot of work

In a big picture perspective my experience is that the service industries in general went through significant innovation and improvements up through the 90‘s but that in the 00’s we have by and large, mainly seen incremental improvements. Slightly better versions of already well known ideas. In a sense several service sectors are finding them selves in a ‘cul-de-sac’ conceptually.

Speed of Change


Opposite this, is the red curve. A model that especially Ray Kurzweil has used to draw our attention to the fact that change is not linear, slow and orderly. But change is occurring around us at an exponential speed. And if you listen to the futurists we ain’t seen noting yet. We are just at the being of this curve, on our way into the steep climb. (If you are not sure that the speed of change is exponential, try and locate a mobile phone that is 5 years old and compare it to the one you have now)

You can see a great clip with Kurzweil explaining all this here

You may even feel that you are not experiencing big changes in your own company just now – but that you are doing things in more or less the same way that you have done for a while – well then there is all the more cause for alarm because you can be sure that your clients are experiencing exponential changes in their lives – and you will not be part of their stakeholder map very soon if you do not realize that.

If you feel that things are under control – you are probably not going fast enough”
Mario Andretti (World champion racing driver)

Where is your focus?


When we look at these two graphs together – it suddenly becomes very clear that the way forward is not to put a huge effort into becoming perfect. I.e working very hard on what we already do in order to get just a little bitt better. Firstly the effort invested will probably not produce more than the famous incremental improvements, but the real danger is that after all that effort we risk getting really good at something that is no longer needed!

So ask your self: What is your focus: Perfection or Differentiation?

This post was very much inspired by this post by Seth Godin

How to Balance Power and Love

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Adam Kahane’s book Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2010) opens with a quote from one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speeches, his last presidential speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference:

”Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economical change…
And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites – polar opposites – so that love is identified with the resignations of power and power with the the denial of love.

Now we have to get this thing right.

What we need to realize is that power with out love is reckless and abusive and love with out power is sentimental and anemic. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.”

Adam Kahane was interviewed for an article in strategy & business, that starts out like this

This is a concept that business leaders need to understand, because in times of crisis (and afterward), the people of an enterprise are put under a great deal of stress. Many people in major corporations today are still wondering if they will lose their jobs. A system that follows only the impulses of compassion and solidarity (which Kahane calls love) will lose its competitiveness; a system that follows only the impulses of resolve and purposefulness (which he calls power) will sacrifice its people heedlessly and risk its capability for growth and recovery. A mix of power and love, however, becomes a stance that a leader can hold, and this stance may, in the end, be the single most important factor in enabling a leader to accomplish great things.

If you think about it, the essence of leadership is skilfully working this balance. It is what leaders do. It is the key to understanding how teams function.

But very few are actually aware that this Power & Love dynamic is present – let alone what their default operating mode is. It was definitely a big eyeopener for me.
It is clearly a concept that we need to work into our GROW leadership curriculum in the future.

Read the full interview here