Mike Hohnen

Great 2 min movie clip from Dan Pink

In his new book Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders author Rajeev Pershawaria describes how managers can motivate people by appealing to the three things that really matter to them.

Most employees care about the same three things–the nature of their Role, their work Environment, and their professional Development (RED)

Asa manager, you need to talk regularly with employees about the three buckets, and as you keep the dialogue going, listen for information about their preferences and aspirations. Armed with this information, you can label and link day-to-day work with their expectations.

Fascinating – and very simple.
Read an extract from the book here

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

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

This is such a fabulous expose

And I am proud to say that most of what Ken Robinson would like to see changed we have solved in our GROW programs. It is exctaly in this spirt we have design and planned the way we deliver our action learning programs