Archive for the ‘Essays’ Category
TOXIC LEADERS
Posted on: September 10, 2021
TOXIC LEADERS – THE TOXIC TRINITY THAT TAKES LEADERS DOWN
Bill Clinton said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
In organizations, “It’s the leadership, stupid.”
The problem with organizations is toxic leadership.
Look around. If you don’t like what you see, look in the mirror. Maybe you can’t improve the entire organization, but you certainly can improve your team.
The sooner leaders own the dark side of organizational life, the sooner the lights come on.
Finger pointing and excuse-making cause organizations to remain dark.
Toxic leadership – the toxic trinity:
#1. Blind leaders can’t see their own incompetence.
There is no hope for those who feel capable when they’re incompetent, until they change their opinion.
Those who are incompetent have little insight into their incompetence. (Dunning-Kruger Effect)
You’re incompetent when you believe your job is more difficult than everyone else’s.
The more competent you feel, the less you know. Those who know the most know they have the most to learn.
Tips for blind leaders:
- Believe and act on the feedback you receive.
- Learn something and share what you’re learning with others.
- Ask questions. Spend a morning just asking questions.
#2. Insecure leaders feel threatened by the success of others.
You feel threatened if:
- Bravado, anger, or certainty are tools for shutting people down.
- You take credit for other people’s work.
- You minimize the success of others.
- Defensiveness is your default response to bad news or problems.
- You hold your head down when you walk the halls.
Tips for insecure leaders:
- Spend a morning praising and thanking.
- List your top 5 weaknesses.
- Develop a new skill with someone on your team.
#3. Squeaky wheel leaders obsess over problems.
Obsessing over problems makes you the problem.
Success is about seizing opportunities, not solving problems. (Inspired by Peter Drucker)
Tip: Monitor the ratio of positive to negative topics in your conversations. The 80/20 rule applies.
What’s on your list of toxic leader traits or behaviors?
Bonus material:
Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing (Ted-Ed 5:07)
8 Traits of Toxic Leadership to Avoid (Psychology Today)
Avoid over-confidence Bias with these 7 Actionable Steps (toggl)
Where are the natural counter-power intellectuals?
The natural counter-power intellectuals feel helpless when citizens are asked to vote for God or civic laws in the Arab World: The mission has always seemed insurmountable.
The hero is an Intellectual with a jihad mission to go one step further in this 100-year war…It took more than 3 centuries of such kind of “fallen heroes” to gain just a foot-hold…
La pratique intellectuelle a pour mission de s’interroger rationnellement sur le « comment » et le « pourquoi » de toutes choses.
Elle a pour essence le doute ,et le brouillard, et pour objectif le flirt avec la verite’ a travers l’acquisition du savoir pour enfin regarder le monde avec un esprit critique et le penser avec du bon sens.
La pratique intellectuelle a aussi pour mission de questionner et de faire réfléchir, elle est à la fois une gourmandise infinie et un contre-pouvoir.
Elle est même le plus puissant des contre-pouvoirs contre l’obscurantisme et le dogmatisme, l’aveuglement superstitieux et les préjugés.
L’intellectuel, se veut engager.
Or il n’y a d’engagement sans dérangement.
Le confort intellectuel est l’autre nom de la bêtise. Il faut donc frapper là où ça dérange, afin que l’on ait envie de participer activement, ardemment, au débat et finalement à la vie de la cite’.
Le plus scandaleux, c’est quand ceux-la n’alertent plus, n’avertissent plus, ne denoncent plus, gardent leur silence.
Pire c’est quand ils passent d’un cote’ de la barriere a l’autre.
Pendant longtemps, l’intellectuel dit « de gauche » a pris la parole et s’est vu reconnaître le droit de parler en tant que maître de vérité et de justice.
Meme dans notre monde arabe ce fut le cas. On l’écoutait, ou il prétendait se faire écouter comme représentant de l’universel.
Etre intellectuel, c’était être un peu la conscience de tous. (…) Il y a bien des années qu’on ne demande plus à l’intellectuel de jouer ce rôle. (…)
Les intellectuels ont pris l’habitude de travailler non pas dans l’universel, l’exemplaire, le juste-et-le-vrai-pour-tous, mais a ghettoye’ le savoir, de l’instrumentaliser au profit d’une personne, d’un capital, d’un engagement materiel.
Finies les luttes pour l’autre, on lutte pour soi, mais avec quel acharnement.
De generateurs de consciences collectives, de contre-pouvoirs, d’eclaireurs de nouvelles voies, les intellectuels des regimes arabes et ceux du printemps arabe, reduisent leur role a celui de “ la voix de leur maître” et non comme une “Voix” a part.
Ils n’ont garde qu’une cigarette en main et une chemise deboutonnee, et un esprit sclerose.
(Inspire par Bourdieu/ Foucault)
Note: The intellectuals in the Middle-East still are confused about their Nationality. Most of the are sectarians and confine their opinions within their State/regime. Many, and they are majority, implicitly dream of an illusory Islamic/Arabic Nation, just because it is Not founded on any tangible reality and they stay within the realm of daydreaming wishes because they are confused in their political objectives and appease their leaders.
The objective and engaged intellectuals should view the Syrian nation (including the States of Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq) as the most rational and effective strategy of a unified One People to defeat our existential enemies in Israel and expansionist Turkey of Erdogan.
Fractured State of Reading, Writing, and Publishing: What Kindle has to do with the future?
Posted on: August 26, 2021
Fractured State of Reading, Writing, and Publishing: What Kindle has to do with the future?
For a long time I never thought I would have any use for a Kindle.
After all, who wants to read on a computer? And what about marking up the text, dogearing pages, or having more than one book open on my desk at a time?
Well, those behaviors are mostly my self-fueled obsessions when authoring original works of nonfiction.
For recreational reading, the mechanisms for highlighting passages and bookmarking pages on the Kindle are, while somewhat clumsy and indirect, still good enough to get the job done.
And then there’s the instant gratification aspect.
This weekend, I was up at my cabin, at 3000′ elevation and nestled deep in the alpine pinnacles of the Cascade Crest, and I decided that I wanted to read another one of the mystery anthologies edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg because I recently read By Hook or By Crook on the recommendation of Kristine Kathryn Rusch and it was fantastic.
So I just brought up the book in the Kindle store, paged through the related reads, and within sixty seconds of the impulse I was reading Between the Dark and the Daylight.
But now I have to read the bloody thing on my smartphone until my new Kindle arrives.
And while I wait, it occurred to me that the fractured Kindle screen pictured above strikes is a perfect image of the publishing industry and the entire state of reading these days.
The old world has been shattered by feedback loops in technology and ongoing market forces that just keep reinforcing one another.
Paper books ain’t going away soon, but I’ll probably live to see the day where they are uncommon for most titles.
Bookstores will be relegated to specialty boutique status, like the camera and stationery stores populating the deserted shoals of strip-malls.
And you know what that smells like to me?
Opportunity.
The Courier was one example of how these shifts might spawn whole new experiences or categories of devices.
The Amazon Tablet might well be another. But whatever the next hot gadget or gizmo is, rest assured, I feel like a technological wolf, scenting a long series of innovations-to-come in the shifting winds, and I’ll be looking to make a killing. 
What of tablets with pen and multi-touch? What of Nicholas Chen’s Multi-Slate Reading System, a federation of cheap slates that you can scatter about your office like the glossy marketing brochures you get in the mail, tossed aside for the day where you may or may not read them? What of flexible, paper-like displays?
We’re still in the stone age here, folks, as far as e-readers are concerned.
We’ll look back fondly on the Kindle and its ilk as the quaint auto-buggies that presaged a sleek, sophisticated, and nearly unrecognizable future.
That’s where I want to be, even if I have to cobble it together with clunky prototypes, Frankenstein monsters of acrylic and delrin etched out by the laser cutter of my dreams.
In the meantime, you could do a lot worse than to follow Kristine Kathryn Rusch and her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, as they talk about what this means for readers and writers and the publishing industry writ large.
Note: The original link http://kenhinckley.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/the-fractured-state-of-reading-and-publishing/
And I yet has to try reading on Kindle: I still has no such gizmos because I love hardcover books and read 3 of them at the same moment. Yes, I get bored reading a single story in one setting.
And I love to take notes and share the opinions and expressions that I liked
20 Commitments to lead? Decisions you don’t reconsider? All the good stuff?
Posted on: August 4, 2021
Leaders without commitments frantically bounce like balls in pinball machines with no clear direction. Commitments are stabilizing stakes in the ground that guide behaviors and inform decisions.
Commitments are decisions you don’t reconsider.
Top leadership commitments include:
- Care.
- Serve.
- Clarify. Clarity drives success.
- Know where you’re going and tell others, often.
- Act. Step toward the future. Only look backward as it enables forward movement.
- Choose optimism or get out of leadership.
- Point out what isn’t working, quickly.
- Don’t whine.
- Set deadlines.
- Find celebration points every day.
- Act in harmony with your heart. Pleasing others always falls within your values.
- Pause. Stop doing and spend time in self-reflection, daily. Failure to reflect creates disconnected frantic lives.
- People before projects. It’s always about building people who become part of effective teams.
- Study people. Know and understand what makes them tick and wind their clocks.
- Ask hard questions.
- Stop giving answers; help others find them.
- Encourage all the time, even when correcting.
- Use mistakes as learning opportunities rather than blaming moments.
- Let others know they matter by explaining their contribution.
- Look people in the eye, gently.
Bonus: Say, “I don’t know. What do you think?”
Facebook contributors have started their own list of leadership commitments: Leadership Freak Coffee Shop
Which leadership commitments are most important?
What did I leave off this list?
The word I don’t hear much
“We have a crisis in leadership. Confidence in leaders continues to decline. At the same time, our current financial situation says we are in desperate need of leaders.”
“Would you trust your leaders to babysit your children?” John Baldoni.
Leadership begins with trust. Acting in the best interest of others builds trust. Self-interest, at the expense of others, destroys trust.
Leaders who think more about what they get than what they give can’t be trusted.
During my conversation with Baldoni, he said, “We need more sacrifice in leadership. Sacrifice is doing what’s right for others, first.” John Baldoni.
The power of sacrifice:
- Sacrifice builds trust, commitment, and loyalty.
- Great achievement always calls for sacrifice.
- Sacrifice reveals the heart. Calling others to sacrifice without self-sacrifice degrades others.
- Self-sacrifice enables leaders to call others to sacrifice.
- Sacrifice is the path to connecting with something bigger than you.
- Leaders willing to sacrifice take the long view.
- Ethics and integrity have meaning in tension between self-service and others-service.
Calling leaders to sacrifice is calling them to love others more than they love themselves.
Many topics in leadership are challenging and awkward; sacrifice tops the list. I don’t hear much about sacrifice. It’s time to bring it back.
Check out John Baldoni’s new book: The Leader’s Pocket Guide: 101 Indispensable Tools, Tips and Techniques for any Situation.
What does leadership-sacrifice look like from your perspective?
Don’t get so busy getting things done that you end up done yourself. Experience shows many leaders between 45 and 55 years old are so connected with business that they become disconnected with themselves.
Don’t get so lost in business that you lose yourself.
Gary Anzolone, CEO of CEO Clubs NYC, sat beside me for lunch yesterday at the Harvard Club. I asked Gary how he became interested in the CEO Club movement.
Gary said he remembered the first time he attended the CEO Club. It gave me a chance for self-reflection, to have conversations about business but not actually do business. As Gary talked, the words refreshed and encouraged came to mind.
Leaders are so busy doing business they seldom take care of themselves beyond distracting entertainments.
Leadership is who you are before it is what you do.
Most leaders most need focused time to care for invisible issues, matters of the heart.
Leader’s hearts are nourished
by authentic relationships with other leaders.
Suggestions:
- Take the first step by opening up, authentically. Don’t spill your guts. Just toss a bit of your heart out.
- Cultivate relationships with those who reciprocate your openness.
- Look for courageous truth speakers who look you in the eye and say it like it is.
- Look for someone who affirms more than fixing or explaining. Fixers offer advice too quickly. Those who explain why you think or feel the way you do, devalue and minimize you. The world is filled with fixers and explainers; stop being one yourself.
- Brag to someone and see if they try to out-do you.
- Celebrate the success of others.
- Look for connections outside your business.
What are you doing to connect with other leaders?
Rationale of this Zionist Roger Cohen for Israel’s successive preemptive wars on Gaza
Posted on: July 28, 2021
Excuses of this Zionist Roger Cohen for Israel’s successive preemptive wars on Gaza
New York Times columnist Roger Cohen is explaining why he has always been and still is “a Zionist”.
He wrote the crucial paragraph that gives the vital context for the Israeli attack on Gaza.
Any discussion that excludes these facts is inherently unreliable:
Adonis Diaries 