psychotherapy, counselling, business coaching, organizational consultation, entrepreneurship, family business consultation
- When Internal Space Meets the Outside
It was one of those perfect days. And I chanced to fall asleep, mid-afternoon. Waking, looking out at a perfectly placid and receptive Manhattan, I had one of those connective moments of thought that are each time, new and precious. It connected “flow”, that psychological sense of competence, challenge and contentment, with another, more developmental [...]
- Cultivating the Flow of Internal Resources
Two terrific forces silently conspire to undermine the equilibrium of the mid-life underemployed. The first is the economic fear of watching one’s savings diminish in the absence of meaningful employment. The second is the related, private shame of unemployment. It is easy to forget one’s lifetime career of productive economic support for self and family [...]
- Only Connect
Marveling at our world of connectivity: instant access to everyone by Linked-In, Facebook, Twitter. Still, the number one frustration of individuals seeking new employment remains the inability to get through, to connect. The appearance of connection is not the fact of connection. That requires response. And response comes from people. A paradox of contemporary life [...]
- Investor Suicide x Equity Shares
The evolving position of the retail investor is as an independent entrepreneur, both exploiting and exploited by the characteristics and opportunities of investment markets as markets become subject to the risks and uncertainties of large group psychology. Decreasingly, the investor is aware of the decisions and events characterizing value determination both of 1) corporations and [...]
- Inflection Point?
The dog woke me at dawn today. With lovely first light streaming in from the East, I fired up the ole computer to read what I take to be the first signs of a new inflection point in this months-long market chaos and my “passive research”. After 5 successive higher closes, the US equities markets [...]
- The Market as Object of Desire
We all exist and grow in our subjective relations to people and things: the significant objects in our lives. But what kind of object is a financial market? Composed of anonymous contributions, it is compounded of decisions themselves based in feeling and thought. We relate to it as we do to a large group or [...]
- Passive Research is to Markets What Action Research is to Firms
Organizational consultants frequently engage in action research, adapting their methods with the multiple contexts of work demands and constraints. Following the organization of financial markets however, requires a different type of participant observation. I have come to think of it as “Passive Research”, attempting to interpret the ups and downs of actions by the electronic [...]
- Lack of demand and the destruction of self-esteem
Just having finished my earlier post, “Psycho-Economic Depression“, I came upon this by Fritz Schumacher, from “Small is Beautiful” (pages 203-204). It seemed to fit: If the nature of change is such that nothing is left for the fathers to teach their sons, or for the sons to accept from their fathers, family life [...]
- Psycho-Economic Depression
The industrial revolution wrought by Frederick Taylor is complete. Production is divided among a mass workforce which, as if by Smith’s “invisible hand”, creates what we need. And so, in Hayek lockstep, we move forward. Its simple, elegant banner is Leonard Read’s classic, “I, a Pencil”. It is true, there is not one of us [...]
- Pairing: Bernanke as an Answer Among Uncertainties
Recent behavior in financial markets really does resemble the dynamics of large groups. Markets, like groups, struggle through long periods of anxiety, attempting to reach some momentary closure that brings sense— at least temporarily— to interactive flux. A perfect example has been the elevation of the Fed’s Ben Bernanke: from Rick Perry’s recent derogation of [...]
