Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes
February 24, 2011
A fascinating statistical graphical mindbending journey through history…and how we really are evolving to getting better. One for the good news at macro level when the micro level bad news gets you down.
Consciousness meets the mainstream – ‘I Am’: the film
February 3, 2011
I for one can’t wait for the new film by Tom Shadyac, ‘I Am‘ to be released in February. Shadyac wrote and directed other Hollywood classics such as Ace Ventura, Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty, but this new film, ‘I Am’ is something completely different. I loved ‘What the Bleep do We Know?’ and ‘I Am’ takes our awareness and consciousness and raises it to the next level in the realm of the wider public, contributing to the awareness of consciousness in everyone.
Shadyac’s story about how he came to make this film is enlightening – and follows the classic ‘awakening’ journeys of people like Eckhart Tolle namely, something dramatic happens to you, you face death – and then you wake up to the simplicity and the Presence of it all. In Shadyac’s case, it was a bicycling accident and incurable post-concussion syndrome.
Here are some quotes from the article that I was particularly drawn to:
“None so far has crossed over to bring the truth of our Oneness and the power of consciousness to the massive mainstream audience.”
“Change starts with consciousness and our own definition of ourselves,” he says. “Each of us has the power to make a difference. It’s the Power of One. Everybody has that power. Just do something. From moment to moment, everything we say or do … or don’t say or don’t do … makes a difference!”
“Mother Teresa never thought about solving hunger or poverty,” he recounts. “She saw a sick, hungry person and reached out to help. What’s needed is an awakening of one’s own heart, a personal transformation. Our outside world is just a manifestation of what we’re holding inside. So the work is on ourselves.”
Read more about the film here.
I for one can’t wait for the new film by Tom Shadyac, ‘I Am‘ to be released in February. Shadyac wrote and directed other Hollywood classics such as Ace Ventura, Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty, but this new film, ‘I Am’ is something completely different. I loved ‘What the Bleep do We Know?’ and ‘I Am’ takes our awareness and consciousness and raises it to the next level in the realm of the wider public, contributing to the awareness of consciousness in everyone.
Shadyac’s story about how he came to make this film is enlightening – and follows the classic ‘awakening’ journeys of people like Eckhart Tolle namely, something dramatic happens to you, you face death – and then you wake up to the simplicity and the Presence of it all. In Shadyac’s case, it was a bicycling accident and incurable post-concussion syndrome.
Here are some quotes from the article that I was particularly drawn to:
“None so far has crossed over to bring the truth of our Oneness and the power of consciousness to the massive mainstream audience.”
“Change starts with consciousness and our own definition of ourselves,” he says. “Each of us has the power to make a difference. It’s the Power of One. Everybody has that power. Just do something. From moment to moment, everything we say or do … or don’t say or don’t do … makes a difference!”
“Mother Teresa never thought about solving hunger or poverty,” he recounts. “She saw a sick, hungry person and reached out to help. What’s needed is an awakening of one’s own heart, a personal transformation. Our outside world is just a manifestation of what we’re holding inside. So the work is on ourselves.”
Read more about the film here.
Conscious Business, Conscious Capitalism and Conscious Leaders – Blazing the trail towards a new era
January 30, 2011
It might just be me and the phenomenon that when you’re wanting to buy a blue car, all you see are blue cars, but everywhere I look these days I see references being made to conscious business, conscious leadership and conscious capitalism. There’s some pretty trendy stuff out there.
Patricia Aburdene writes about it in her 2005 book Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism. And Peter Russell, a British futurist, talks in his book The Global Brain Awakens about our inevitable move, in the first quarter of this century, from the Age of Information to the Age of Consciousness. I don’t know about you, but I want to be catching that wave, not paddling behind it.
John Mackey, Co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market and one of the founders of Conscious Capitalism, writes convincingly about creating a new paradigm for business. His views are well considered and well-backed. Tellingly, he writes how our traditional economic models belong to the industrial age, where companies were seen as machines with output-input ratios and where, ultimately, the output was singularly seen to be making a profit. He contrasts this with the new paradigm of Conscious Business.
Conscious Business is not a soft option for hippies turned corporate leaders. It doesn’t mean turning into a soft do-gooder. Far from sitting cross-legged chanting on the boardroom table chanting ‘om’, conscious business and conscious leaders are instead concerned with balancing out the interplay of all constituents of their businesses. Employees, suppliers, customers, shareholders and society/the community at large are all considered as part of an indivisible whole. The Conscious Leader’s role is to optimize the health and value of the entire complex, evolving and self-organising system. Focusing only on profits leads to the kind of debacles we’ve seen recently from the global economic recession all the way back to Enron: leaders, and decision-making, led by greed.
Conversely (and pleasantly surprising, in my view), a recent study by Jagdish Sheth (Firms of Endearment: the Pursuit of Purpose and Profit, 2007) showed that 30 companies that are managed to optimize total stakeholder value instead of focusing strictly on profits (i.e. conscious businesses), far outperformed the publicly traded companies on the S&P 500. We’re not talking mom and pop’s shop on the street corner here. We’re talking Whole Foods, Southwest Airlines, Patagonia, Google.
It just goes to show that conscious businesses and conscious leaders can have enormous fun playing on the field of business and competition and making profits, without sacrificing themselves completely to the quest for world domination and the dollar – and, ironically, they seem to do better at it when taking this approach.
I’ve explored these themes further in a new article about conscious business and conscious leadership: Conscious Leadership – Catching the Wave…
Conscious Leadership – The wave is coming
January 26, 2011
Using the lure of Conscious Leadership as a cutting edge phenomenon, I went client hunting with a colleague of mine this week. She has a number of clients in Johannesburg and has already run the full range of her own workshops with them, so she was looking for something new, in the form of my programmes – and especially Conscious Leadership – to offer them.
I must admit I was a bit nervous about these meetings. Not only did I worry how I would package such a vast subject into easily digestible chunks, but I also didn’t know how it would be received. Would they think I was wacky? A bit of a hippie in a corporate suit? From another planet?
As it happens, we had fantastic conversations. They were fascinated by the field of Conscious Leadership, the Consciousness Quotient, and consciousness as a whole. Far from getting the blank stare about how on earth this stuff was applicable to their corporate worlds, I discovered great interest and an immediate resonance about how this could be useful in their organisations. In fact, we ran over time in both meetings, and neither client was the slightest bit concerned, such was their level of engagement.
I sense that something about Conscious Leadership spoke to their human side, to the people they really are, rather than their roles. Instead of becoming involved in an intellectual debate and pow-wow, we connected at the levels of heart and our shared experience of being human.
What a great experience! I can’t wait to see more corporates to talk about the possibilities of this emerging field and what it can do for their organisations. And the more I work with it, the clearer it becomes to me and the more excited I get about what we are creating.
Conscious Leadership is coming…
The Importance of Trusted Advisor Client Relationships
January 25, 2011
After no less than a year of wooing a particularly big client in South Africa, they – at last! Hooray! – gave the go ahead for running a workshop on building trusted advisor client relationships for their Senior Partners. It’s been a long time coming – several proposals, flights to and from their offices, conference calls and, virtually, candlelit dinners – but today they said yes. It just goes to show that it can take a very long time to be proposed to in these marriages to a client, but it is entirely worth the effort. I’m looking forward to a long and fruitful relationship with them.
The programme – Creating High Value Client Relationships – has already been run in other parts of the world for this client, one of the big four professional services firms. It’s hugely successful in their UK, Europe and US regions, and we have also been implementing it for them across seven countries in Central Africa. It’s based on David Maister’s work The Trusted Advisor, but takes it to a whole new level by also getting you to take a strategic look at your client relationships, planning which relationships needs to be shifted, and practising the skills of how to engage with your client in order to do this.
Those attending learn the skills of moving from a market space in which their clients see them as the solution suppliers (come to me, I’ll give you one of those for X price) to a trusted advisor relationship (let’s talk about your business more broadly and see where I can help). The one is highly competitive, price-sensitive and you are easily interchangeable with your competitors. The other gets you the opportunity to act as a trusted business advisor and engage in conversations about their future. Not only is this a hugely interesting space within which to operate, but it differentiates you from your competitors – and the cross-selling and business spotting opportunities are immense.
Next week I’m off to deliver a similar workshop for a big banking client in Nigeria. It’ll be interesting to see how the notoriously upfront Nigerian culture receives this notion of deep, trust-based client relationships. The last time I was there delivering a workshop, the participants worked us as facilitators far harder than we worked them. Herding cats comes to mind – or perhaps more like those dog races at Dagenham in London. As a facilitator you throw in a hare of an idea, and they’re off! Chasing it and arguing loudly and good-naturedly amongst themselves, and very hard to bring them back on track it was too. I’m looking forward to seeing what next week brings.
Making the Consciousness Quotient (CQ) Practical
December 23, 2010
I’m very excited: it seems that Ov (Professor Ovidiu Brazdau), originator of the Consciousness Quotient (or CQ) is keen to collaborate on finding ways to make CQ applicable in the world through research. He has set up a research institute in his native Budapest and has a whole host of psychologists working on the instrument. He’s very positive about working with us to look at how it can be applied.
Here are some immediate thoughts:
I’d like to measure the CQ of coaching clients before and after a cycle of consciousness coaching. In theory, their consciousness levels should go up, which should be reflected in the CQ re-test.
Then, I’d like to use the CQ as a measure of consciousness before and after a workshop we are devising on raising consciousness in organisations called ‘Conscious Self-Management – From EQ to CQ’. It builds on Goleman’s EQ work because, in actuality, relationship and emotional intelligence are just one of the dimensions on which we can become more conscious. This is not to undermine Goleman’s excellent body of work, but we now have the opportunity to go further, broader, deeper – thanks to the natural evolution of our knowledge and thinking.
This is one incredibly exciting field to pioneering in.
See the article here: Demystifying the Consciousness Quotient (Sept 2010)
