By Shae Hadden
Bio
Whether we’re talking about the problems in our organizations, our local communities or the world, the conversation seems to revolve around two themes: having someone to blame (a culprit) and having someone who will lead us from our problems toward a solution in the future (a hero). What if leadership was an expression of each individual’s responsibility for creating the future, instead of being a solution to a problem?
Responsibility is not about who we can blame, who caused
I just spent an interesting week at a country house outside of Barcelona—read that as a 400-year-old remodeled hacienda retreat with world-class chef included. The week was wonderful, fun and very productive. Let me explain.
I was invited to facilitate a meeting of the top team of a major multinational corporation who were working to create their vision and plans for the next few years. These six executives are from four different countries and are tops in their industry. Collectively their
I’ve been musing about David Suzuki’s campaign some more…. If I were leader of a major nation, I think I’d be overwhelmed by all the input from every imaginable camp, not to mention the politics of decision-making and the drift toward ‘governance by poll’. I don’t think there is a centralized institution in the world capable of taking on all the items that need to be addressed in the timeframes that
Some words of wisdom here shared over at Blog Disease from the Hopi Nation:
You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour.
Now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour.
And there are things to be considered:
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your Truth. Create your community. Be good to
This has been a tougher-than-usual posting to write. I am not in any way agreeing with the President’s decision to send more troops to Iraq, nor am I attempting to silence the voice of those who oppose or disagree with his policies. I need to make it clear I am writing to my fellow Americans because George W Bush is our president and we live under our current Constitution. I am advocating that unless and until we can learn to embrace and align ourselves with our leaders within our system of
Since I starting blogging a couple of months ago, I find myself
waking up in the middle of the night with something inside me screaming
to be said. Tonight it is cynical ambition. What I mean by that is the
kind of “Do anything for power — or money, or sex, or fame”. You can
fill in the ‘it’ that people will do anything to have.
I
have spent most of my life trying to be positive, to stand for
something, to leave the world a bit better than I found it. Sometimes I
have
I was leading a seminar today in St. Lucia for about 80 people. We
were talking about organizational culture, but I was showing them that
culture is culture…the only difference is the perspective and scope of
the conversation. So the culture of an organization, the culture of a
country or the culture of a society can be viewed as the same
phenomenon—simply different levels of what people say about ‘the way it
is around here’. In other words, my view
I was talking with a fellow recently who was asking why this blog is called Serene Ambition™.
He thought that the two words didn’t seem to go together. He could get
‘serenity’ and also understand ‘ambition’, but together they made no
sense to him. In our normal way of relating to the world, you can have
serenity (meaning inner peace, calmness, maybe even joy) or you can be
ambitious (meaning committed to creating or accomplishing