Dive into the archives.
- DayTrading & Managing Our Own Minds
Increasingly, clients have described their turn to trading in volatile and uncertain markets, as their corporate incomes have vanished and their assessments of possible return to their former workforce positions have darkened. Day trading. Paradoxically, they have embraced uncertainty as their former sense of loyalty to firm and task has been disappointed. Their “security”, they [...]
- A New Transition: Rethinking Career
“It is exhausting?” (Yes it is) “Is it necessary?” (Yes it is) “I’ve never worked harder in my life” (Probably true) “Is there a “There” there?” (Barring unforeseen circumstances, of course…) Questions and answers between clients and psychologist: reporting back on the work necessary to create the successful transition between “what was” before unemployment, underemployment, [...]
- WKI: Charles Handy’s Corroboration
Here is the link to Charles Handy’s Marketplace podcast. Definitelty worth listening to– though I may be biased; but the world we’ve been describing is the one he is describing, too. The time has come for invention and innovation: especially if you’re over 50!
- 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 [...]
- 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. Exercise 2 for Reluctant Entrepreneurs.
Eight arguments against trying the Working Knowledge Initiative and one reason for. 1) The premises of WKI are unreliable, untested (by me), and might discount my view of reality. Its something new— I’d prefer the tried and true. There’s nothing really wrong, anyway. Things will get better. I’ll wait to find work. 2) If my [...]
- Bridging Disciplines
Psychological consultation, despite its qualitative breadth, runs a risk familiar to most organizations— from family units to multinational corporations: the silo. Silos are exactly what their agricultural images suggest: bounded containers within which a particular kind of stuff, product, or service, is kept. When the “stuff” is social science consultation, however, the separation of social [...]
- Speaking Prose All Along…..
There’s that old story about the fella who discovers that he’s been speaking prose his entire life. That’s what I thought, suddenly, listening to the recently self-employed gentleman, despairing of his recent downsizing. I call him self-employed, though he would not yet admit it: because he’s now on his own. He’s smarting because the conditions [...]
- The Real Stressed Bank Test
My client was stressed. “The banks (or most of them) got a clean bill of health, “ he began. “The market is in a buying frenzy,” he continued. “Then why did my business loan just get denied?” He’d returned from a visit to his bank, the US branch of a famously solvent European outfit; and [...]
- The Business of Family
Awash in information, we scan the headlines continuously, adjusting our ongoing visions of externalities upon which we depend: politics, economics, and shifts in the markets. We trust the fine attunement of our filtering capabilities to deliver a unified picture of the front pages we consume from multiple sources- sometimes print, sometimes tv, increasingly internet. Our [...]
