i'll gladly change

If anyone can refute me – show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective – I’ll gladly change.

It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Modern Library. 2003. P.73, Book 6, #21. Also see The Internet Classics Archive | The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (mit.edu)

people we lead have big stories

Prevailing management wisdom has over-taught the importance of boundaries in workplace relationships. Of course healthy boundaries are important. But the reality is, as my own research has borne out, distance does not lead to objectivity. It leads to ignorance. Leaders need to know their people. Know about their families, their interests, and their life outside of work. “You can’t truly understand how to lead someone you only know in one dimension of life.” This becomes especially true for Millennials, whose work life and whole life are highly integrated.  Leaders must understand the aspirations of those they lead to ensure they are tailoring their leadership to those aspirations. “People we lead have big stories, and we are part of that story. We need to understand how they are thinking about the bigger story of their life to know what part we play.”

 Ron Carucci in an interview with Mark C. Crowley
"Four Radical Leadership Practices That Will Dramatically Increase Engagement" Forbes. 3/1/2016

looking for character

Wright: When you bring someone into the Spurs organization, what do you look for?

Popovich: Oh, boy. This is going to be a long interview. For us, it’s easy. We’re looking for character, but what the hell does that mean? We’re looking for people -- and I’ve said it many times -- that have gotten over themselves. And you can tell that pretty quick. You can talk to somebody for four or five minutes, and you can tell if it’s about them or if they understand that they’re just a piece of the puzzle. So we look for that.

A sense of humor is a huge thing with us. You’ve got to be able to laugh. You’ve got to be able to take a dig, give a dig, that sort of thing, and feel comfortable in your own skin that you don’t have all the answers. People who are participatory. The guys in the film room can tell me what they think of how we played last night if they want to. Sean Marks would sit in on our coaches meetings when we’re arguing about how to play the pick-and-roll or who we’re going to play or who we’re going to sit.

We need people who can handle information and not take it personally because in most of these organizations, there’s a big divide. All of the sudden, the wall goes up between management and coaching, and everybody is ready to blame back and forth. And that’s the rule, rather than the exception. It just happens, but that’s about people. It’s about finding people who have all those kinds of qualities, so we do our best to look for that, and when somebody comes, they figure it out pretty quick.


Michael C. Wright
"Gregg Popovich on Kobe Bryant: 'You can't help but just watch him'" ESPN. 2/20/2016

mapping the coast of the island of knowledge

Michael Smithson, a social scientist at Australian National University who co-taught an online course on ignorance this summer, uses this analogy: The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask. Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.

Mapping the coast of the island of knowledge, to continue the metaphor, requires a grasp of the psychology of ambiguity. The ever-expanding shoreline, where questions are born of answers, is terrain characterized by vague and conflicting information. The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.

The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” The center of the island, by contrast, is safe and comforting, which may explain why businesses struggle to stay innovative. When things go well, companies “drop out of learning mode,” Gary P. Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me. They flee uncertainty and head for the island’s interior.

Jamie Holmes

"The Case for Teaching Ignorance" The New York Times. 8/24/2015