Creative Leadership Coaching

Earlier in this blog we talked about the hamster “wheel of fear,” that self-perpetuating spiral of fear and reaction that tends to lead us precisely where we don’t want to go.  We’ve been discussing some concepts and tools to help us live and work more consciously, proactively, and creatively, towards the goals we really want [...]

In Western culture, we tend to be inclined to believe in and aim towards static and desireable future. In myths and fairy tailes, our heroes’ and heroines’ journies end in a static, experientially eternal state of bliss or pain. This is also a theme of monotheistic religions, which have shaped our worldview over the past [...]

One of my mentor-coaches, Lou D’Alo www.powerupcoaching.com signs his emails with the phrase, “To your fulfilling success.” I really appreciate this phrase, because it expresses a Partnership approach to success that encompasses both our qualititative experience — happiness and fulfillment  — and our quantitiative results. It feels richer and more complete. An activity or state of [...]

The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted by Professor Philip G. Zimbardo in 1971 at Stanford University to explore the question of the power of situation to shape the moral behavior of participants. The role play involved simulating a prison in the basement of one of the buildings at Stanford. The study recruited male college students [...]

One famous experiment that really illustrates how perspective can draw out or diminish human potential is the experiment first conducted in the 1960s by American teacher Jane Elliott, who went on to become an anti-racism activist.  In this exercise, she praised brown-eyed children as ”hardworking” and “intelligent,” and dismissed blue-eyed children as being innately less hardworking and intelligent. In light of that [...]

Executive coach Robert Hargrove (1995) asks, “Why do so few chief executives succeed at making their vision statements come alive, even when people agree with them intellectually and emotionally? Why are so many managers and employees frustrated, skeptical, and even cynical aobut their own ability to make something happen?” (107) Hargrove interviewed Dr. Peter Scott-Morgan, an [...]

My colleagues seated in the rows behind us seemed to be much slower on the uptake than I had given them credit for. Could it be that we leaders in the front row were, in fact, smarter? To begin at the beginning, my colleagues and I were attending a workshop that I had organized for [...]

The key quesiton isn’t “what fosters creativity?”  But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? but why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense [...]

Usually, when we think about strategy, we don’t think about culture. Culture is a given – it’s just there.  In this post, I propose that culture is always an implicit aspect of strategy and that, by recognizing it as such, we can better position ourselves to achieve extra-ordinary results. Theory It can sometimes be helpful to [...]