Personal Development

Some of us spend a great deal of our lives waiting for or seeking “permission to begin” from others.  It’s a subtle thing.  It actually stops us from starting.  Waiting for permission—or even [...]

In 1994, David Whyte, then a consulting corporate poet, published The Heart Aroused:  Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America.  That book had a soothing effect on me as I [...]

One of the most common complaints about collaboration is that “it takes too long.”  Frankly that is because we are so bad at it, and the basic skills are not part of the standard repertoire in [...]

For the last 10 years I have been teaching a mechanistic conflict model that tends to work well in software development environments.  It was developed by Kenneth W. Thomas and Ralph H. Kilmann [...]

As we encourage increased transparency at every level throughout organizations, we don’t really seem to engage the topic of how to take your lumps or deal with falling short of the mark.  There [...]

Recently I was walking my dog at a nature preserve.  The path we were on was newly paved—it hadn’t been a few years ago when we had last walked here.  Much of the river bottom land on either side [...]

The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings. — “Happy Thought,”  Robert Louis Stevenson Today I spent a couple of engrossing hours [...]

The nature of my work is such that I can spend hours reading, reading, reading—especially now that I’m also focused on completing a graduate degree.  But, I’ve been attracted to intellectual [...]

There were a lot of very scary things early on in the life of my office administrator and cockapoo, George.  In fact, pretty much everything was scary.  I realized that unless we confronted these [...]

Well, it’s happened again.  It’s Monday (or Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday), and you have to go to work.  And there he is again, sitting on the end of your bed—with the gun.  Some days [...]