How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.
– Niels Bohr
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Quote
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Anger management
There’s a new series on TV2 about anger management. It turns out that in most cases where we danes are hopping mad inside, we try hard to maintain a calm exterior.
Which got me thinking: Might this also be going on at work..?
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Quote
A leader is best when the people are hardly aware of his existence,
not so good when people stand in fear,
worse, when people are contemptuous.Fail to honour people, and they will fail to honur you.
But a good leader who speaks little,
when his task is accomplished, his work done,
the people say “We did it ourselves.”– Lao Tzu
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Book review: The cathedral within
The cathedral within by Bill Shore is about charity. Bill Shore is the founder and executive director of Share Our Strength, an organization that supports anti-hunger and anti-poverty efforts worldwide.
This book strengthened my conviction, that giving is important. Giving something to your community or your world confirms your identity, it strengthens your spirit and creates meaning for both individuals and organizations.
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FAST personality test
How about an MBTI test that only takes a couple of minutes? I tried it, and in just four questions it figured out that I’m an ENFP. I’ve tried other MBTI tests that had a lot more questions, and they gave the same result. Try it.
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Book review: The fifth discipline fieldbook
The fifth discipline by Peter Senge is probably the most influential book on learning organizations. It laid the theoretical groundwork for creating learning organizations by defining five essential skills: Systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning.
The Fifth discipline fieldbook follows up on the theory, and offers a wealth of methods and tools to strenghten the practice of the disciplines. It also contains lots of case stories from many different companies.
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What get’s measured get’s done: True or False?
I’ve heard it often: What get’s measured get’s done. It’s especially popular among proponents of Balanced Scorecards and similar management tools.
I think it’s wrong. Click more and I’ll tell you why I think so.
Well first of all, what does the statement mean? Most often it’s used as a reason to measure performance in your organization, so it has several meanings:
1: If you want to make sure that something is done, you need to measure it.
2: You can adequately measure results
3: You can know the state of your organization through measurementsI disagree. It’s not that measurements in an organization are superfluous – it’s just never the whole truth.
Here’s why I disagree with the statement:
If you only accept the results that you can measure (and most people who tout the statement do), then the statement becomes a tautology and thus is meaningless. It then says in effect that “What get’s measured is what we have measured”. So (and this is pretty funny) this statement only makes sense, if you accept the existence of non-measured results.And this is the whole point: In all organizations, much of the work done and much of the value created is unmeasured and maybe even unmeasureable. Let’s say a person has a great day, and spreads a good mood in his department. Can you measure that? No! Is it important? Certainly! It can have a significant impact on that departments productivity.
Let’s say a project comes in on time and on budget. You can (and probably will measure that, as well you should). Maybe that project cost one of the key workers her marriage. Will that be measured? No! Is it important? Well, when she resigns in three months, it will be!
So what get’s measured is not what get’s done. There’s so much else being done that has huge impact on your organization, which will never be measured. We must learn to live with this!
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Book review: Change
When and how do people change? And when do they get stuck in situations and problems that seem hopeless? This is the focus of this book, Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution.
The book is based on the authors’ experiences with brief therapy. Unlike traditional psychotherapy, which tries to uncover the “deeper” causes of problems, brief therapy focuses on solving peoples current problems. Why spend years of therapy going back to the hypothetical root cause of some problem, when what you really need to do, is get rid of the issue now. And even IF you find the cause of the problem, you still haven’t solved it.
The authors claim to have helped 80% of their clients in 4 sessions or less!
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