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Too often respect isn't even earned. It's demanded. And if you must earn respect, you're already starting from a place of disrespect.
It's not a comfortable place to be, is it?
Do you value accountability? Does accountability help you play a smaller or a bigger game?
We're talking collaboration today. How much do you value collaboration?
How well are you set up to help your people play collaboratively?
Was mindfulness drummed into you as a child, as it was to me?
“Mind the steam! …Mind the Gap! …Mind that’s sharp, you'll cut yourself!”
What makes you most cross about how things work or done within your organization?
In my 40 years of working in large organizations that thing that bugged me most was the lack of transparency.
TL;DR Lack of transparency in organizations leads to power struggles and destroys collaboration efforts.
To me honesty is the first step in helping people see that no problem's too big for us to act and leave the world better for what we've done.
But it ain't easy. (Right?)
I feel a huge loss of trust politically, corporately, and even an individual level whereby it's harder to speak your truth. Or at least, we perceive that it's harder to speak our truth.
So, value. When I say value what do you think?
Do you think financial value? Or, think more about that set of values on the wall, or not? Do you feel somewhat disconnected with the whole notion of value?
Because it's become so meaningless in a corporate sense. (Right?) Something that often is being directed from the top. You're told what is of financial value. You're told what behavioural value is. (Yeah?)
I'd like to start a new conversation on value.
G’day, Richard here.
Value is quite an old concept, but it's really become quite tarnished over these last two or three or more decades. Increasingly, we see wars, cruelty, hate, poverty, hunger …you name it. Wherever you look, we find politicians telling us one thing doing another.
And one can wonder, as individuals in the world, what on Earth can we do?
Some feel quite powerless. Powerless to the point of giving up, perhaps lost almost to the point of depression. Or a bit like me last year, getting on my social media and shouting out in a bit of anger from time to time.
But that ain't gonna make things better.
If we want better, we've got to *create* better. To be better, we need to work from our own sense of value. (Right?)
Sunday dinner. A weekly ritual connecting our family in three locations. The conversation moves to privilege of birth, statesmanship and expected behaviours of those in high position. I’m at once engaged and soon detached, hearing myself fall into arguing with my grandson, Cameron.
My detachment sparks a realisation: Liminal states are common. Whenever we let go of a state of being that no longer serves us and evolve to a new state of being, we move through a liminality in time, space and mind.
Sitting between two Generals, briefing the results of experimenting with priorities for $60B+ of investments.
I see his Deputy streaking ahead in the briefing paper.
He interrupts.
We all live two lives. The second one begins when we realise we have only one life.