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]
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]
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]
September 19, 2018 | Posted by: Rick Torseth | No Comments
Sonny Rollins is probably the greatest tenor saxophone player in all of jazz. His journey from a novice eight-year-old player to today owes as much to effort as to talent. When it comes to building leadership capacity, his life illustrates how technique trumps scheme. But what is technique and what is scheme? The Oxford dictionary defines them this way: Scheme: A large-scalesystematic plan or arrangement for attaining some particular … [READ MORE]
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]