Dive into the archives.
- Executive Coaching, Greek Sovereign Debt, & Market Bubbles
This week’s mighty global market turbulence gripped both our attention and stomachs. Naturally, it entered consulting discussions as clients reflected on their relation to markets.
Some thoughts:plentiful and current over-supplies of information, facilitated by technology, allow market participants to react more quickly (also helped by technology) than ever before
while we react to momentary market shifts—for example, [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: Entrepreneurship is Making Use of Reciprocity
A question from a client who’d worked in the non-profit sector throughout her professional life got me to thinking. She was adamant that entrepreneurship meant exploitation. And committed to community building, she was concerned that personal gain meant diminution of the common good.
On reflection, what she’d left out was reciprocity. The only way that community [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: The Stories We Tell Ourselves as Others Hear Them
Here is a simple exercise: take a room of mature, urban professionals– highly educated & highly skilled. Ask each to reflect on a personal vignette, mirroring their sense of accomplishment and pride. Then contrast what capabilities they think are reflected in their own stories with the capabilities that others actually hear in their stories: the [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: Security and Temporary Organization
I woke up in the middle of the night with a singular dream image in my thoughts: it was an egg carton.
Thinking about it, I started to chuckle. I recalled it exactly. It had been about 40 years ago— and the first time I’d travelled outside the United States. I had been investigating the foreign [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: The Midlife “NO!”
The first hurdle facing consideration of independent employment for the midlife professional is internal. Its that assertive inner voice that says, “Hey—I’m 45, 50, 55, 60 years old. If I were a risk-taking entrepreneur, I would have been doing it years ago. I wouldn’t have worked the way I’ve worked, throughout my work life.” The [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: Q&A
Q: “Okay, I’ve read the writeup, seen the “movie” and might come on November 3. But what’s the real deal here?”
A: The Working Knowledge Initiative will begin its Manhattan, Community-Wide program on November 3 under the sponsorship of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun and the Accord Advisory Group. The current recession has caused much anguish and pain [...]
- Developing Virtual Muscle
The Working Knowledge Initiative is learning as it progresses: and this is learning that passes along to its participants. It wasn’t long ago, in my clinical practice, that I’d check in and out of my emails at the beginning and end of the day (listening to messages on the telephone answering machine sporadically). Like many [...]
- The Working Knowledge Initiative: Giving Ideas Away
Throughout our lives, most of us have heard the expression, “what goes around comes around”— usually as a bitter comment attempting to suggest consolation.
Well, it is true. My colleague Annette Clancy of Inter-Actions, is a firm believer in the merits of giving it away: of floating ideas to others, in deepening the conversation, of thickening [...]
- Case Study: A Working Knowledge Initiative Success
“ Its been quite a process with its share of ups and downs, but the business model is consolidated, our aims are clear, and what you’ve helped me to learn about my own strengths and competencies, I couldn’t have dreamed of eighteen months ago.”
— C, on his successful use of the “Working Knowledge Initiative”
C’s “Working [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative. Transforming the sunk cost of job loss.
Peter Goodman reports in today’s New York Times that the underemplyment rate– including the jobless and those working part time though desirous of full-time work– has reached 17% of the workforce. That’s up from even a week ago .
Pausing for a moment both to reflect on the despair of economic dislocation and to ask, “what [...]


