August 28, 2018 | Posted by: Rick Torseth | No Comments
I have a smart friend named Laura. She works on global health projects around the world. She says, “People are sheep.” I think what she is saying is the people don’t pay much attention to the leaders they follow. They don’t make much distinction between hierarchy and leading. What Laura knows is that these two … [READ MORE]
March 5, 2019 | Posted by: Rick Torseth | No Comments
It would be hard to find many people who do not recognize the face of Greta Thunberg. After all, for the moment, she is the face of the climate change movement. She began her personal contribution to the movement by standing outside the Swedish parliament building in August 2018 holding her “school strike for climate” … [READ MORE]
February 26, 2019 | Posted by: Theresa Torseth | No Comments
The design of learning institutions is in a transformation from teacher-focused to student-centric. That’s in line with emphasis on more collaborative work and learning environments. BORA, a Portland-based architecture firm, is leading the way in creating spaces where people learn and create together. My conversation with Principal Amy Donohue focused on the human factors … [READ MORE]
February 24, 2019 | Posted by: Rick Torseth | Comments: 1
In 1993, Burkard Sievers wrote a book entitled Work, Death, and Life Itself that hardly anyone other than his family read. More of us should have read it. We’d have a better understanding of the world today and slightly less anxiety. As an organizational development professor, he has made it his business to understand how … [READ MORE]
December 20, 2018 | Posted by: Rick Torseth | No Comments
Peggy McIntosh lives under my bed. She has since September. She will not leave me alone thank god. I participated in a webinar this week. It was hosted by three leaders of an organization that support leadership development. They have a book coming out in the new year and the purpose of the webinar was … [READ MORE]
December 13, 2018 | Posted by: Rick Torseth | No Comments
In the landmark article ‘Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning’, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber observed that there are a set of problems that cannot be resolved with traditional analytical approaches. They labeled such problems ‘Wicked Problems’. Wicked problems, according to Horst and Webber, have ten characteristics: There is no definitive formulation of … [READ MORE]
December 12, 2018 | Posted by: Rick Torseth | Comments: 5
“ You buried the lede again.” I was in Sister Benadicta’s sixth grade class and I had asked my father to read my essay on the Declaration of Independence. A mistake I would repeat for most of my school life. With a red pencil, he went to work. By the time he finished his edits, … [READ MORE]
November 30, 2018 | Posted by: Rick Torseth | No Comments
“The report of my leadership development death by PowerPoint was not an exaggeration.” – A program participant with a nod to Mark Twain. Over a period of 15 years, at Harvard University, Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky developed a teaching method called Case-In-Point. The leadership development sector has been … [READ MORE]
November 10, 2018 | Posted by: Rick Torseth | No Comments
Fewer kingdoms. More leading. There is a big difference between choosing leaders and choosing to lead. Of late, we are not so good at either choice. I think it’s because we are confused about what a leader does. Recently, we seem to be drawn to people who claim they will protect us from harm both … [READ MORE]
October 20, 2018 | Posted by: Rick Torseth | No Comments
A scene from the movie 3 Kings starring George Clooney: “You’re scared, right?” “Maybe.” “The way it works is, you do the thing you’re scared s***less of, and you get the courage AFTER you do it, not before you do it.” “That’s a dumbass way to work. It should be the other way around.” “I know. That’s the … [READ MORE]
October 4, 2018 | Posted by: Rick Torseth | No Comments
Peter Block says “In organizations, the opposite of love is not hate, it’s efficiency.” Efficiency often means moving so fast to get work done that we lose connection with people as people. Since work in organizations gets done through teams, this is a problem. Google was experiencing this issue with their teams so they … [READ MORE]