macbogert

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Bruno Cignacco - Treating Employees Well is Good Business soundbite

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Are your teams stressed out? Is any team not? Think of this stress as inflammation inside your organization, which always creates pain.  It also always has a cause. We help with both.

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Virus - Like

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Isolation is not Safety: Isolation during these times breeds a kind of social virus that paralyzes all of us. Stop pretending that we are more different than alike. We're sharing a lifeboat right now. Together.

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The quality of mercy

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Turning Your Emotions Into Action

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the nut and the gourd

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Isaias - I'm not trying to minimize the damage of Isaias, but have you noticed how after the passage of a storm, the next day is clear and clean, freshly washed? Perhaps we can embrace the possibility that the passage of the pandemic may create that same opportunity for our society.

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Sine Waves - Pandemic Overlap

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Sound Leadership

The instrument –

I was fortunate to be born a stutterer. As a result, I became expert in synonyms, since if I could instantly switch to another word, no one would catch on that I was stuck. The payoff? I gained a marvelous vocabulary. And since I grew up in a family that treasured music, my folks expected all four of us kids to sing, always in harmony and usually in pajamas. Though…

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The Listening Tricks

“You can interrupt the chorus of monologues by being the first to listen”

William Ury

Listening . . .

. . . is the builder of lifelong learning and of strong relationships. It is also the key to building functional and productive leadership. It’s even critical for playing in a band. Above all, listening demonstrates courage and trust. For some reason, we prefer talking over it.

When…

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Discomfort and Pain

“Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

John F. Kennedy

What’s the difference?

It’s easy to blur the divide between discomfort and pain. After all, advertising surrounds us with the message that relief is just a pill away. Or a self-help book away. Maybe an app. Or a drink away. We even treat the discomfort of emotions with a dose of another emotion—feeling…

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The Energy of Unresolved Difference

The Energy of Unresolved Difference

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.                                                       E. O. Wilson

The dead-end approach

I grew up in a family without conflict. Hahahahahaha. We were all expert at avoiding locking horns. We followed a simple formula: Emotions are dangerous, conflict stirs up emotions, ips…

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We Must Be Mistaken

We Must Be Mistaken

It starts with the X

When I was a classroom teacher, I had a box of red pens. Marking a paper or a test, I might make an encouraging comment or point out something well written, but mostly I marked wrong answers. Mistakes. So why did I call attention to the wrong answers? With rare exceptions, the correct answers far outnumbered the errors. The red mark drew attention—mine and theirs—to what was…

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Near Enemies

Emotions in disguise

You may have had the pleasure of reading the novels of Louise Penny. Her mysteries provide great opportunities to be entranced, not only by the solving of a convoluted murder but by powerful insights into what makes us tick, some of us more exotically than others.

She has a repertory cast of a half-dozen inhabitants of Three Pines, a fictitious village in Quebec. Th struggle…

[macbogert]

Near Enemies

You may have had the pleasure of reading the novels of Louise Penny. Her mysteries provide great opportunities to be entranced, not only by the solving of a convoluted murder but by powerful insights into what makes us tick, some of us more exotically than others.

She has a repertory cast of a half-dozen inhabitants of Three Pines, a fictitious village in Quebec, who struggle with understanding…

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Conversations over Computations

   I recently had the pleasure of finishing Robert Harris’s Pompeii, a terrific novel set in 79 AD. The plot covers engineering, physics, politics, corruption, love and redemption. In the final pages, Pliny ―an historical figure and famous observer of natural history―is engulfed by the pyrostatic surge from Vesuvius. A rigorously logical scientist, he’s perplexed by what he didn’t foresee, and…