people & performance / strategy & solutions
With dimwitted politicians across the political spectrum, our celebrity-crazed culture, the destructive power of unrestrained capitalism, the groaning of the despoiled earth, the cries of the back row that go unheard, the disillusionment and disorientation of a society that desperately needs to be rehumanized—all of this requires broken and humble thinkers, the wounded thinkers.
— Luma Sims in “Thinking is self-emptying”
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?
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, October 1842:
Thou shalt read Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Proclus, Jamblichus, Porphyry, Aristotle, Virgil, Plutarch, Apuleius, Chaucer, Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Jonson, Ford, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Bacon, Marvell, More, Milton, Molière, Swedenborg, Goethe.
[It] exists in a society to the degree that those enlisted in its contending interests have a basic minimal regard for each other: one party or interest seeks the defeat of an opposing interest on matters of policy, but at the same time seeks to avoid crushing the opposition, denying the legitimacy of its existence or its values, or inflicting upon it extreme and gratuitous humiliations beyond the substance of the gains that are being sought.
The basic humanity of the opposition is not forgotten; civility is not abandoned; the sense that a community life must be carried on after the acerbic issues of the moment have been fought over and won is seldom very far out of mind; an awareness that the opposition will someday be the government is always present
You probably do not understand yourself as well as you think you do.
More here.
Bertrand Russell on a fulfilling life:
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.
An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls.
Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
More here.
Para formar profesionales reflexivos, debemos tener en cuenta tres dimensiones:
Y esto significa una visión amplia de la reflexión, que incluye
Y en este proceso es clave incorporar las humanidades en la formación de profesionales. No como complemento o decoración, sino como un camino de acceso privilegiado a la comprensión del propio lugar en el mundo.
Por eso la sumisión a la innovación y el cambio como valores absolutos arrastra en muchas personas la mentalidad de que no hay nada relevante que se pueda aprender o considerar de las grandes producciones canónicas de la humanidad
via Josep M. Lozano.
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.
Simon Caulkin [website, @nikluac] in The Guardian:
The irony is that we know what makes companies prosper in the long term. They manage themselves as whole systems, look after their people, use targets and incentives with extreme caution, keep pay differentials narrow (we really are in this together) and treat profits as the score rather than the game. And it’s a given that in the long term companies can’t thrive unless they have society’s interests at heart along with their own.
So why do so many boards and managers, supported by politicians, systematically do the opposite – run companies as top-down dictatorships, pursue growth by merger, destroy teamwork with runaway incentives, attack employment rights and conditions, outsource customer service, treat their stakeholders as resources to be exploited, and refuse wider responsibilities to society?
The answer is that management in the 1980s was subject to an ideological hijack by Chicago economics that put at the heart of governance a reductive “economic man” view of human nature needing to be bribed or whipped to do their exclusive job of maximising shareholder returns. Embedded in the codes, these assumptions now have the status of unchallenged truths.
Survey courses in “Western Civilization,” once a common component of undergraduate curricula, have almost disappeared as a requirement at many large private research universities and public flagships, according to a study by the National Association of Scholars.
The report finds that, since 1968, the number of the selected colleges that require Western Civilization courses as a component of general education curricula and U.S. history as a component of history majors has dropped. ( via Inside Higher Ed)
Meanwhile,
the Dean of a well-ranked business school is proud to announce that his graduate studies contains a combination of character-building (often discussed as an outcome in high school) and the humanities (often perceived to be the overall outcome of undergraduate education).
Go figure.