Sunday, April 12, 2009

Reset: What to do when you don’t know what to do

"What do we do to do when we are in important jobs and we really don't know what to do? Many, many people are in exactly that position this evening. Only their spouses know." e-mail from J., a CEO of a large company in the Midwest My friend J. is not alone. People I talk with are sensing that we are in a period of fundamental change, where the assumptions of how the world works, of how our lives work, of how we work, are shifting in ways that we can barely see, never mind comprehend and internalize so we can plan for the future.

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 4:47 PM | 2 Comments
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Saturday, April 4, 2009

Reset and Reading - Into the Mainstream

Before we start, two news bulletins: Starting Tuesday, April 13, our firm will have a regular weekly feature on the home page of the Washington Post's On Leadership website. It's called Leadership House Call. The idea is that you - and yes, I mean you, will send us a current leadership challenge, and we will comment on it and stimulate a wider conversation on the issue. PLEASE send your dilemmas to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). We will need a small framing title and a way to identify you. Thanks. And news bulletin number two: my colleague Alexander Grashow and I published a piece on Reset on the Huffington Post last week. Here's the URL if you want to take a look: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-linsky-and-alexander-grashow/obama-is-reset---are-you_b_181467.html

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 6:59 PM | 8 Comments
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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Reset Partisanship and Anger…..

Lots of anger out there. In the past days, I have received missives from four good friends of different ages, backgrounds, experience and communities (although all US citizens). They are all liberal Democrats and early Obama supporters, and all four of them sent angry, even furious diatribes against right-wing politicians, commentators, and George W. Bush.

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 7:02 PM | 3 Comments
Tags: obama, courage, leadership, emotion, politics, geithner, congress, republican

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Barack and Harvey: Hands on the Thermostat

I just saw "Milk". Pretty good movie, I thought. But also a pretty good leadership lesson.

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 7:03 PM | 7 Comments
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Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Crime and Punishment

Watching Madoff being taken away in handcuffs last week, I was thinking about crime and punishment, and whether those who recklessly led us into the current financial mess ought to share more of the pain, whether or not they committed a crime.

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 2:48 PM | 2 Comments
Tags: courage, reset, leadership, risk, crime

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Reset = Tough Choices

Reset requires figuring out what of all that you say value is really important and must be preserved, and what of all that you value you must leave behind in order to adapt to a fundamental new reality. Doing that work is not a lot of fun. It forces you or your organization to modify your self-identity, change who you are, and take a loss of something that was important to your sense of self.

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Posted by Marty Linsky at 2:55 PM | 5 Comments
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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 3:06 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 3:18 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 3:47 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 3:55 PM | 7 Comments
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