Blog

I was once told by someone I greatly respect that I should consider not being quite so vulnerable in the pulpit. He was genuinely concerned for me, saying that down deep people really want their leaders to appear strong and project a sense of certainty and confidence. Although he didn’t use these exact words I…
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STONE(Thobar Phádraig)The face in the stone is a mirror looking into you.You have gazed into the moving waters,you have seen the slow light, in the skyabove Lough Inagh, beneath you, streams have flowed,and rivers of earth have moved beneath your feet,but you have never looked into the immovabilityof stone like this, the way it holds…
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SOMETIMESSometimesif you move carefullythrough the forest, breathinglike the onesin the old stories, who could crossa shimmering bed of leaveswithout a sound, you cometo a placewhose only task is to trouble youwith tinybut frightening requests, conceived out of nowherebut in this placebeginning to lead everywhere. Requests to stop whatyou are doing right now,and to stop what youare becomingwhile you do it, questionsthat can makeor…
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When we aren’t satisfied with how things are going in your organization of life, one of the most powerful questions to ask, according to poet David Whyte, is how do we stop having the conversations we’ve been having? How do we just stop having the conversations we’re having that aren’t serving us well? When we pay…
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An Irish poet walks into a corporate boardroom… Sounds like the set up to a bad joke, doesn’t it? Only, boardrooms all over organizational life have been where poet David Whyte has spent a great deal of his life. Whyte, an associate faculty member at Oxford’s Saïd School of Business, has consulted with giants like…
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For many years I served my Presbytery by chairing our Committee on Ministry. We were mainly responsible for the caring and feeding of pastors. One of the more fun areas involved working with churches in the process of calling a new pastor. I learned a lot by watching how pastor nominating committees discerned who they…
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“Life is a series of negotiations.” –Erica Ariel Fox, Former Director of Harvard Negotiation Insight Initiative From the moment we wake up until the moment our head hits the pillow at night, we move from one negotiation to another. We do this so often, most of us don’t give it a second thought. But we…
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This weekend I’m leading an adult education class at another church about predictable irrationality and politics. I agreed to do this class months ago. When I got back in touch with the guy who extended the invitation, I was like: “Well, I’m happy to come if you still want me…but this election season is so…
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I remember the first time I heard the word “ideate”, which means to form an idea, imagine, or conceive of something. It was a few months ago. My partner casually tossed it into a conversation, and I snorted: “Ideate? What kind of a word is THAT? That’s exactly the kind of made up business-speak that…
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One of the reasons design thinking has become so powerful in organizational life is that the problems we face today are qualitatively different than the ones facing previous generations. Stanford’s Banny Bannerjee showed us a powerful chart dividing problems up depending on the familiarity or novelty of the contexts and solutions. The easiest place to…
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