My own search for stillness…or why I often ski alone
Read moreThe last two posts—on idleness and stillness—have pushed me toward some further reading and exploring around these and other related concepts. While such subjects have been themes of my reflection in the past, it has been good to revisit them and to gather insight from some new sources. Though they use somewhat different terminology, both Ricardo Semler and Pico Iyer
Stillness
Read moreOne of the things I like most about writing a blog is receiving messages, comments and suggestions from readers. After last week’s post about Ricardo Semler’s views on idleness, someone wrote to ask if I had seen a TED talk by Pico Iyer called “The art of stillness”. As I had never seen or heard of Pico Iyer, I first
Praise for the idle mind
Read moreOn a long overnight flight this week, I watched a TED talk by Brazilian luminary Ricardo Semler, entitled “Work with no rules”. Semler is the CEO and majority owner of Semco Partners, a Brazilian company known for its radical form of industrial democracy and corporate re-engineering. His innovative business management policies have attracted widespread interest around the world. His first book, Virando a
Why we have trouble doing nothing
Read moreWhen I began perusing the research paper “Learning by Thinking: Overcoming the Bias for Action through Reflection”, one of my first thoughts concerned the title of the piece. I wondered about what type of bias for action the authors meant, since I have seen the term used in more than one way. For example, Tom Peters is often credited with
Thoughts about the learning-thinking connection
Read moreThis week, I delve a bit more into some of the ideas of the paper I referred to last time: “Learning by Thinking: Overcoming the Bias for Action through Reflection”. This article was interesting to me for two reasons. First, I think the research breaks new ground, as it uses three experiments to demonstrate that putting more reflection in our
Reflection and the young, busy manager
Read moreRecently, I spoke to a focused and lively audience at Banco Galicia in Buenos Aires. For the past two years, I have been writing articles for their remarkably well done digital platform, buenosnegocios.com. As part of the program, they periodically invite writers to make presentations at breakfast events. Attendees at such talks tend to be middle managers from the bank’s client