I recently heard someone use this metaphor for the first time, and found it really interesting. In essense, spiders and starfish may look alike, both being multi-legged creatures, but upon investigation prove to be very different. Cut a leg off a spider, and you get a slightly disabled seven-legged (less effective) creature; cut off its head and you have a dead spider. In contrast, if you cut off the arm of a starfish, it will grow a new one. Even [...]
Sonja handed me a book the other day with these words, "This is the best fantasy novel ever written!" Being a avid reader and an ever-increasing fan of the genre I obliged and took the book. Raymond E. Feist's Magician is the afore-mentioned novel. Barely a few chapters into the book I am struck by a thread in the Hero's Journey narrative plot that is still fresh in my mind after reading Philip Pullman's Northern Lights recently. In both stories the central character [...]
I’m currently reading Dan Brown’s novel Deception Point (not his best, but not a bad weekend read). I was struck by the motto of one of the characters - ‘Find the truth. Act on it’. My first thought was that this is such a simple statement, but with a lot of punch. If more leaders would adopt this as their personal ‘mission statement’ it would certainly have a great impact on the companies, countries, etc, that they’re supposed to be leading. Often, [...]
"I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism." ~ Charles M. Schwab We often conduct narrative based culture audits in organisations, and more often than not, one of the key patterns we find is negativity around leaders who don't acknowledge the effort of their employees. In South Africa, where skills shortages and high staff turnover create headaches [...]
Dave Snowden, founder of Cognitive Edgeco-authored (with Mary Boone) the front pagearticle of the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review. For those of us who've been involved in Dave's complexity and narrative work over the years, this is a key milestone - indicative of how our way of thinking is starting to make in-roads into mainstream thinking. To quote Tom Stewart (HBR Editor), "Most leaders are told that it is important to be (or appear to be) decisive. Fair enough — but how is one [...]
