Sunday, March 8, 2009

Reset Losses: Autonomy, Privacy, Control

Reset as a leadership behavior is a more difficult option than hunkering down because it requires taking deep losses, which none of us especially enjoy. The losses are experienced in giving up practices, behaviors, ways of being and especially the values which are part of our identity. They constitute "who we are" as if we were some immutable beings rather than constantly learning and evolving.

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 12:06 PM | 9 Comments
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Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Reset Reading

I was disappointed to read David Brooks column this morning. The usually cool-headed centrist seems to have lost it, ranting about Obama's "transformational liberalism". Brooks is right that The President has not chosen between his long term domestic priorities and the need to stimulate the economic recovery now. Obama is placing a big bet that the recovery will happen soon enough and steeply enough so that he can have his cake and eat it, too.

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 12:18 PM | 8 Comments
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Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Obama, You and the Paradox of Leadership

Tuesday night Obama walked carefully along the razor's edge of leadership: trying to be both realistic and optimistic. It's a tough balancing act. If the current and near term reality is pretty bad, reminding us of that is a downer. But if turning that around requires that we have faith and believe in the future, Obama has to be brimming with optimism. Many of the commentaries this morning tried to put him in one camp or the other, either praising (mostly) or criticizing (very few that I could find, except from the most predictable voices) his optimism or realism.

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 12:47 PM | 2 Comments
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Monday, February 23, 2009

Will You Reset or Hunker Down?

Are you individually and we as a country going to treat the current reality as a one-time thing that we need to overcome, or as a signal that the sands are permanently shifting and that all our assumptions need to be dredged up and examined and potentially re-calibrated? Are you going to Hunker Down or Reset?

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 12:55 PM | 7 Comments
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Sunday, February 15, 2009

What If this is as good as it gets?

"What if this is as good as it gets?" That's the line Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) delivers in the movie "As Good as It Gets" as he scans the depressed faces waiting for their 50-minute hours in the psychiatrist's anteroom.

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 12:59 PM | 2 Comments
Tags: reset, emotion, passion

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The Dangers of Leadership

For better or worse, the current crisis is a terrific leadership learning laboratory. But first, check out David Leonhardt's column in Wednesday's NY Times today. He does a much better job than I did last week of laying out the spend-or-save dilemma. The headline? Spend to save. Lots of homey examples. The one I like the best is to buy a seltzer-making machine.

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 1:03 PM | Add the first comment!
Tags: leadership, crisis

Saturday, February 7, 2009

My Piece of the Mess, Part II

I do want to be a good citizen. I am old enough to remember JFK's challenge to "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." While I think "country" is a rather arbitrary boundary - think family, neighborhood, community, or world - I take what he said seriously.

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 1:08 PM | 1 Comments
Tags: congress, jfk

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

My Piece of the Mess, Part I

OK, ok. I made no millions by investing with Madoff, nor did I lose millions investing with him. But life is pretty good. No complaints. Nice New York apartment. Wonderful healthy family. Steady work. Can pay my bills, up to now at least. What's not to like?

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 1:05 PM | 2 Comments
Tags: investment, madoff

Thursday, January 15, 2009

In Praise of Selfishness - Part II

Besides taking care of yourself, leadership requires selfishness in another, very different way. You have to believe in what you are doing, totally committed to your purpose, absorbed by it, willing to sacrifice other important, but not as important purposes in its behalf.

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 7:15 AM | Add the first comment!
Tags: leadership

Sunday, January 11, 2009

In Praise of Selfishness as a Leadership Behavior - Part I

On the many friends and acquaintances who have been cut down by cancer, three good friends, two women and a man, stand out because they died fairly close in time to one another, relatively young, and sharing a way of being in the world which is pretty uncommon in my experience.

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 7:13 AM | 2 Comments
Tags: obama, leadership, selfishness

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