From the category archives:

Learning

Socrates Was On To Something

July 2, 2010

Both of my kids are really into the stretchy bracelet craze. On the way to the grocery store today, my nine year old son remarked that one of his bracelets looked liked Medusa.  Feigning ignorance, I said, “Medusa? Who’s that?”  He replied, “You know, Mom, the mythological character who had snakes on top of her [...]

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5 Lessons Learned from a Failed Project

May 29, 2010

Last week, I wrote about a powerful leadership lesson learned when my key project crashed and burned.  People Equation reader Nancy asked about the lessons learned from that experience. Indeed, there were several. But first, the story of “The Institute”, the project that gave me both fits and gifts. . . Years ago, I joined [...]

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Redemption

May 23, 2010

Have you ever led a high-visibility project that has crashed and burned? I have and it taught me a powerful leadership lesson. Read on . . . The Back Story Many years ago, shortly after I joined a Fortune 500 company, I was assigned to manage a project called the “Institute”. The Institute was an [...]

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Giving Back

April 14, 2010

Miss Mulder greets me at the entrance to the kindergarten classroom. I settle into a child-sized chair at the front of a brightly colored floor rug (“The Pretty Rug” as Miss Mulder calls it) and arrange my reading materials. “Good morning!” I say cheerfully to a group of smiling, upturned faces. “Good morning!”responds the enthusiastic [...]

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Leadership by Design: Intersection of Art and Science

April 1, 2010

Yesterday I was talking “shop” with two colleagues.  We’re all in the business of helping develop leaders and the talk turned to instructional design.  One of us asked, “How do you go about finding an instructional designer who also has deep experience in creating leadership programs for senior-level staff?”   We noodled this idea around [...]

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Not Everyone’s a Critic

October 1, 2009

Not everyone’s a critic, but some days it sure feels like it.  Case in point: in my community this year some very enterprising philanthropists organized a fantastic event called ArtPrize. The event opened September 23, 2009. In essence, it’s an art competition with an “open source” feel.  Artists from anywhere in the world are eligible [...]

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The Art of Serendipity

September 17, 2009

I was comparing notes on competency development the other day with Mollie Lombardi of the Aberdeen Group*. At some point during our conversation, the talk turned to Twitter because that’s where I met Mollie.  We were discussing the massive flow of information via the tweet stream and Mollie said, “Yes, Twitter gives me a chance [...]

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The Daily Ordinary Thing

September 10, 2009

In her 30 Day Blogging Challenge Sandra Martini asserts that to move your business forward, you have to “get in the habit of doing one ordinary thing each and every day.”  Well, that seems simple.  Or is it?  The online Merriam-Webster’s definition of “ordinary” is the regular or customary condition or course of things.  So [...]

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30 Days of Blogging

September 10, 2009

During my 30 Days of Tweeting Experiment in May, I jumped into Twitter with both feet and very low expectations. As it turned out, I loved Twitter. One of the delights of tweeting was discovering the blogsphere and its many opinionated, generous, insightful writers contained within. Before I knew it, I had set up a [...]

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Are Your Learners Twitterpated?

August 7, 2009

We were at the dinner table the other night and my husband tossed out a word that was new to me: twitterpated.  He assured me it was a real word and made reference to the Disney movie “Bambi“.  I thought he was mocking my Twitter use, so I looked it up.  Sure enough, the online [...]

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