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June 2010 - Volume 1, Issue 3

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Seven Acupuncture Points to Shifting Capitalism - Otto Scharmer What shifts are needed for capitalism to function in a regenerative fashion, accounting for the full ecosystem? A look at the history provides some clues. Measuring Real Progress - Ron Colman Why have we been unable to create the kind of society we genuinely want? One reason is that we have all been getting the wrong messages from our current measures of progress. The Yin and Yang of Creating - Robert Fritz In some ways, any creation is sequential - first vision, then current reality, then action steps. Other aspects happen simultaneously, one of which is creating's Yin to its Yang. Leadership: What's love got to do with it? - Tamara J. Woodbury Risky as it is, we must find ways to bring love and well-being back into our organisational cultures if we aspire to move leadership out of the domain of fear. Reinventing Management - Julian Birkinshaw The most spectacular failures from Enron to GM to Lehman Brothers are due in part to failures of management. There are many management models, and success depends on picking the right one. The Power of Brands to Create Better Futures - Santiago Gowland Especially when your products are consumed billions of times a day, you have an opportunity and responsibility to build sustainable values into your brand. Theories X and Y, Revisited - Matthew Stewart Fifty years ago, Douglas McGregor clarified some deep assumptions about the nature of human beings in his articulation of Theory X and Theory Y. Now it's time to examine assumptions about relationships.

There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea

When I was a boy at summer camp, we sang a song that seemed to celebrate the prepositional phrase. Its first stanza had only two:    There's a hole in the bottom of the sea.    There's a hole in the bottom of the sea.    There's hole, there's a hole    There's a hole in the bottom of the sea. Each stanza added another, so the one-liner became:    There's a log in the hole in the bottom of the sea Which evolved from stanza to stanza, getting pretty elaborate:    There's a fleck on the speck on the tail     on the frog on the bump on the branch     on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea Pretty elaborate and incredibly prophetic of course because (as I write this) there is a hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and there are flecks and specks and slicks and plumes all over the surrounding ecosystem. I will confess to being fascinated and horrified - as I assume many people are - by how such a small thing, a pipe measured in centimetres, can wreak such havoc over thousands of square kilometres of ocean, thousands of kilometres of shoreline, millions of people, and countless birds, fish and other marine life. It is as if mother earth herself was wounded, and no one can staunch the bleeding. Also shocking is this disaster's intransigence, defying humankind's best ingenuity - ingenuity that claims, for example, to be able to get one seven-inch pipe to intersect another seven-inch pipe under a mile of ocean and a mile of rock. It is easy to empathise with Mr. Obama's impatience when he said, "Just plug the damn thing." The third fascination this monster of a disaster presents is its slow and steady unfolding. We can sense that it is only a matter of time before oil that leaves the pipe reaches the surface, before underwater plumes are carried far and wide, and before slicks make landfall in more and more places. Even if someone just plugs the damn thing soon, the aftermath will be with us for quite a while. So these three disaster complexities - the something-small-affects-something-big dynamic, the relative inability of humans to manage it, and the necessity to see things in a bigger time frame - are going to confront us again and again. They are built into global climate change, into widespread economic inequity, and into the huge cultural schisms of our time. I think we need to find the acupuncture points - the points of leverage - that will alleviate our biggest challenges, and we will probably need many such points. Some will no doubt happen at the level of behaviour; our everyday actions and decisions, when multiplied by the millions or billions of other people doing the same, can have profound effect. Some acupuncture points will be at the level of our thinking and assumptions - we will conceive of things differently to obtain different results. And some points will be at the deepest level of basic awareness and how we are as human beings. This issue of the Oxford Leadership Journal is all about such acupuncture points. Given the disaster complexities mentioned above, faith in the existence of acupuncture points is necessary and the search for them, critical. The Journal, one could say, is predicated on that faith and dedicated to that search. Please let us know where your search has taken you, and what you have discovered. Robert Ziegler, Editor ABOUT THE OXFORD LEADERSHIP JOURNAL CONTACT ABOUT THE OXFORD LEADERSHIP ACADEMY  | SUBSCRIBE  | UNSUBSCRIBE | DOWNLOAD ENTIRE ISSUE (1.8 MB) | SHARE