Dive into the archives.
- The Corner Bank or Saturday Night Live?: Getting a Loan, Part 2
The saga of the business loan continues. The wise bank branch manager has explained to me that the bank is looking for any reason to turn down loans, “we’re now in the loan denial business.” So I thought I’d listen to her “creative” idea for securing small-business bank money. Just another neighborhood banking service. Here [...]
- Case Study: Uncertainty and the Questionable Productivity of Certainty
Certainty is a momentary phenomenon of rootedness in the passing of time. The certain is the unchangeable, the fact of the present as it recedes into history. Beyond the unchangeable, looking forward, is the highly probable. Given what we know in the present, what do we see coming next?
With slightly more uncertainty, we enter the [...]
- 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: 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 [...]
- Composing a Language
One of the results of studying different disciplines– clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, group relations, business administration, organizational development, and industrial-organizational psychology—is a parochial confusion of tongues.
What one discipline holds as the meaning of a word or concept is not its understanding within another, related discipline. For example, “personality” within the i-o world conjures the very useful [...]
- Fixing the Financial System: The Bank of England’s Systemic View of Organizational Behavior
Andrew G. Haldane , Executive Director for Financial Stability of the Bank of England, delivered a remarkable paper at the April 2009 meeting of the Financial Student Association, in Amsterdam. Entitled, “Rethinking the Financial Network”, its deserved acclaim in the world press concerns its reliance on the study of complexity in natural systems: from epidemiology [...]
- Family Business: Opportunity Lost in a Daughter’s Recognition of Dad’s Grumpiness
“Gosh, you’re grumpy today,” I heard, as I parked the car.
It hadn’t been addressed to me, but to the man in the car beside me, by his adolescent daughter. Though not feeling particularly grumpy myself, her comment got me thinking.
Everyone experiences moods. Some, more frequently and more intensely than others. Everyone experiences moments of concentration, [...]
- The Real Shift in Middle Age Development
The current economic climate in the United States serves as a catalyst for a shift in the normative developmental tasks of middle age. The popular twentieth century pattern of career leading to retirement has ended.
Partly obscured within the spiraling numbers of unemployed workers of all ages, is the high incidence of professional knowledge workers, freed [...]
- Organizational Coaching for Individuals During Unemployment
The dialogs between the blog writer and the reader begin in the blog post’s generalization and develop according to increasingly particular themes. These are initially signaled by the reader/respondent who brings them to the essayist’s attention. They are then elaborated through successive pairings of letter and response between correspondents.
Thinking about this process along the lines [...]
