Category: Persons

How can management theories guide life decisions?

On the last day of class, Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, asks his students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves to find cogent answers to three questions:

First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?

Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness?

Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?

Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.

As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life decisions.

More at How will you measure your life?

 

 

 

C’est quoi un pote?

Un souffre-douleur, un faire-valoir;

À la vie, à la mort;

Quelqu’un avec qui on aime être, davantage que seul.

L’extrait qui suit  est tiré d’un making of d’un film que j’ai beaucoup aimé. Un truc qui raconte une histoire. Pas de morale, pas de grands messages, une vignette sur la naissance d’une amitié.

 

Your identity in an object

During last week’s workshop we discussed thinking differently about our work and about ourselves. Here’s an example:

It is an object that has helped him construct, interpret, ponder and crystallize his identity, or at least his idea of it. It came to him in the early 1970s, when he was in medical school at the University of Lisbon. The sculpture, made by a woman he had just begun dating a fellow neuroscience student and a sculptor named Hanna Costa, is a little terra-cotta figure of a man seeming to fight his way forward in a storm. And it all but cried out to Dr. Damasio with a mysterious urgency.

“Somehow I felt that it was me, or belonged to me,” he recalled. -via NYTimes.com.

The model of rational choice is faulty

Virtually all of the assumptions built into it about human beings and the world are false:

  • It assumes that people are self-interested. Well, yes and no.
  • It assumes that there is a common scale of value on which everything can be compared. There isn’t.
  • It assumes that we can attach meaningful probabilities to outcomes. Sometimes we can, but life is not a roulette wheel or a series of coin flips, in which probabilities are well defined.

If we are to move toward societies of greater opportunity and justice, we need a more expansive notion of what it means to be rational than we will ever get from economics.

via Barry Schwartz.

Being v. doing

All of our focus is on the doing. We obsess over the latest models churned out by for-profits and nonprofits alike. The social enterprise classes at Harvard Business School study the things people are doing. When a foundation asks for an impact report, they mean the impact of the doing.

It is all backwards.

What we should be asking is who people are being. Are you being courageous? Are you being authentic? Honest? Rigorous? Unstoppable? Because that’s what really makes a difference.

It’s who you are being that matters

via Dan Pallotta.

On the discourse of being

Words often fail us and prove inadequate in the face of the most profound human experiences, whether tragic, ecstatic, or sublime. And yet it is in those moments, perhaps especially in those moments, that we feel the need to exist for lack of a better word, either to comfort or to share or to participate. But the medium best suited for doing so is the body, and it is the body that is, of necessity, abstracted from so much of our digital interaction with the world. With our bodies we may communicate without speaking. It is a communication by being and perhaps also doing, rather than by speaking.

Of course, embodied presence may seem, by comparison to its more disembodied counterparts, both less effectual and more fraught with risk. Embodied presence enjoys none of the amplification that technologies of communication afford. It cannot, after all, reach beyond the immediate place and time. And it is vulnerable presence. Embodied presence involves us with others, often in unmanageable, messy ways that are uncomfortable and awkward. But that awkwardness is also a measure of the power latent in embodied presence.

Embodied presence also liberates us from the need to prematurely reach for rational explanation and solutions — for an answer. If I can only speak, then the use of words will require me to search for sense. Silence can contemplate the mysterious, the absurd, and the act of grace, but words must search for reasons and fixes. This is, in its proper time, not an entirely futile endeavor; but its time is usually not in the aftermath. In the aftermath of the tragic, when silence and “being with” and touch may be the only appropriate responses, then only embodied presence will do. Its consolations are irreducible. This, I think, is part of the meaning of the Incarnation: the embrace of the fullness of our humanity.

Words and the media that convey them, of course, have their place, and they are necessary and sometimes good and beautiful besides. But words are often incomplete, insufficient. We cannot content ourselves with being the “disincarnate users” of electronic media that McLuhan worried about, nor can we allow the assumptions and priorities of disincarnate media to constrain our understanding of what it means to be human in this world.

via The Frailest Thing.

My business icon is my cleaning lady

She’s on her own, she cleans people’s homes, she’s incredibly nice. She brings flowers every time she cleans, and she’s just respectful and nice and awesome.

Why can’t more people be like that?

She’s been doing it some twenty-odd years, and that’s just an incredible success story.

To me that’s far more interesting than a tech company that’s hiring a bunch of people, just got their fourth round of financing for 12 million dollars, and they’re still losing money. That’s what everyone talks about as being exciting, but I think that’s an absolutely disgusting scenario when it comes to business.

via  Jason Fried, founder and CEO of 37signals

García-Noblejas: “La comunicación no debe ser histérica”

Promuevo que la comunicación no sea histérica, ni repentina, ni de instintos. Hoy tenemos asociado el sonido de la llegada de un mensaje a través de cualquiera de los nuevos dispositivos con la inmediatez y esto es una esclavitud. Los esclavos son los que hoy no pueden prescindir de la red, del ordenador, de las llamadas, etc. Los señores de sí mismos son capaces de desconectarse. Esto es lo que llamo lentitud Slow Communication, no estar acelerado.

Por ejemplo, si estas con una persona pensando en lo que va a pasar después, entonces no estás con la persona. La comunicación debe respetar el presente de las personas.

Tengo un día a la semana que no uso la red. Si quiero leer, anulo el correo, el teléfono y me desconecto. 24 horas a la semana sin estar en contacto con la red es muy saludable. Algunos sienten que no pueden estar desconectados y el efecto carencia es muy parecido al del fumador empedernido. Eso es lo malo y es de lo que conviene saber gobernar. Prefiero ser un protagonista de mi propia vida que ser un reaccionario de acuerdo a las motivaciones externas.

via U de los Andes.