For the last 20 years, I have built a coaching and consulting practice on the foundation of leadership ideas that, frankly, have changed very little since Napoleon Hill published “Think and Grow Rich” in 1937. Hill’s book and its successors, from Dale Carnegie to Stephen Covey to Ken Blanchard to Simon Sinek, top the bestseller lists year after year.
If you are in an environment that works on the assumptions these folks are making, all of that advice is very solid. Developing missions, visions, values, “key performance indicators,” and goals will always serve a team well in the pursuit of efficiency and success, by the traditional American capitalist definitions.
AND, I think this stuff is slowly killing us.
Many of the assumptions that underlie the entire field of “leadership development” are both validated by the evidence and, in my opinion, utterly toxic. For that reason, I’m abandoning all of it in favor of a different way of thinking, feeling, and showing up in the world (and here on the internet). I’ve chosen to re-imagine my website as a container for an entirely different way of thinking about work and life — one that, in all honesty, may not work at all in any American company as it exists in this moment. Some of my ideas are probably going to sound crazy, naive, or impossible.
But in the current situation, where money is increasingly disaggregated from value, profit is consolidated while risk is dispersed, and the consequences of centuries of rapid extraction and exploitation of resources are becoming impossible to ignore, I assert that what we are doing is not sustainable. We need a new way of working.
I call it Working Magic.
On My Mind Lately
