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“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” ∞ Goethe

I watched the accompanying videos with a sense of joy and high appreciation for the 18 thought leaders who co-created the American Leadership Forum (ALF) curriculum with me back in the 1980’s as we began to launch the forum program nationally. These were commanding figures in the then emerging discipline of leadership development. Prior to then in business and academic circles, it was “widely accepted that leaders were born not made. We thought otherwise and set out to prove it. [Read more…] about The Power of Acting in an Instant: The Story of the American Leadership Foundation

I’m sure most of you have been reading how well accepted meditation is becoming. A week hardly passes without my seeing another well written article on this personal practice. Most of these pieces focus on the well documented fact that medication has enormous health benefits (including decreasing blood pressure and moderating heart rate) and lowers the serious effects of having a stressful life. For most people, meditation enables a happier, healthier more fulfilling life. But there is another key benefit of meditation that is rarely if ever mentioned: Meditation affects the next moment. [Read more…] about Meditation Affects the Next Moment

David Bohm was a scientist whose range of interests covered not only his primary focus of theoretical physics but also a wide span of topics including language, creativity, thought and social responsibility. The Dalai Lama once joked that David Bohm had become his physics teacher. Einstein often referred to Bohm as his “spiritual son” and believed that he had the genius and creativity to take critical steps beyond relativity theory. [Read more…] about Bohm’s Infinite Potential

Many of you may have seen that we have lost a giant in the field of leadership development – Warren Bennis of the University of Southern California, where he had been a distinguished professor of business administration for over 30 years. Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic and now a professor at the Harvard Business School, once said “I look at Peter Drucker as the Father of Management and Warren Bennis as the Father of Leadership.” Bennis was an advisor to four presidents: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Gerald R. Ford, and Ronald Reagan.

It was my privilege to count Dr. Bennis as a personal friend and mentor. During the decade of the 1980s, Warren helped me found the American Leadership Forum (ALF) and co-chaired the committee that developed the curriculum for ALF. During the 1990s while I was at Shell and worked with the MIT Organizational Learning Center, I worked with Bennis as he developed the Leadership Institute at USC. [Read more…] about The Wisdom of Warren Bennis: A Sense of Wonder

Profound Experience Leading To Discovery

I’m certain many of you have had the same experience as I’ve had over the years. You’ve had a direct experience that was very personal and important to you, but was hard to explain to others – because it didn’t conform to the old traditional, mechanistic view of the way the world operates. It was a more creative, intuitive impulse, guided by your human spirit, rather than your pure rational intellect. It was filled with a spirit of freedom and perhaps idealism.

Since it was too hard to explain, you tucked it away in a safe place. Then later, you read of or heard a well-respected thought leader – a scientist, physician or philosopher – write about that very same experience, verifying what you knew was true. And then it goes “Clunk” for you! “Yes! That’s what happened – that’s what I was feeling.” It’s an experience of total confirmation of what you experienced – even though it seemed extraordinary. You say, “Now I know I’m not crazy.”

When I wrote the book, Source: The Inner Path of Knowledge Creation, I was writing in that same domain – that domain of extraordinary experience. I felt I was really sticking my neck out. I wrote about the U-Process we had developed and written about ten years earlier – a theory, set of practices and a process for profound discovery. But in the book, Source, I was sharing my new knowledge. I said the essence of the U is this: there is a Source of infinite knowledge and potential lying hidden at the “bottom of the U”, waiting for us to access it – to help us fulfill our dreams and resolve the most challenging issues facing us, individually and collectively. At its heart, the U-Process is about the entrepreneurial impulse – and how to harness it for profound discovery for the benefit of humankind. To reliably access it takes personal work, personal development: a focus on your interior condition.

As I was doing the research on the book and as I was writing the first draft of the manuscript, I kept having that experience of “Clunk. Yes! That precisely confirms what I am writing – it’s beautifully giving voice to my experience”.

I began calling it “when the lines begin to cross”.

I was reminded of a speech I had given earlier, quoting a highly respected columnist describing our current condition: “We are in the midst of a knowledge revolution – a renaissance taking place in all the disciplines, breaking the boundaries between them, transforming them at their furthest reaches where they all converge.”

After the book was published, I kept coming across these confirming messages. And I might say the most important were from my readers who reported to me that they had shared the very same experience.

Each time I receive these messages, I silently say to myself, “Yes. This is the Universe we live in. It’s full of infinite potential, waiting for us to discover – if we just keep an open heart, open mind and open will.”

Throughout your life, people come along your path; and only in hindsight do you realize the significant impact they had on you.That is the case with Coach Rose.

I grew up in Houston, Texas and lived there until I transferred to UT Austin during my second year of college. After college and law school, I began my professional career as an attorney at Bracewell & Giuliani.

While I was practicing law in Houston during the 60s and 70s, I was privileged to handle the routine legal affairs for two of my high school football coaches – Curtis “Dike” Rose and O.L. Middleton. After moving to London in 1976 and later to Boston, I rarely saw them. Soon after my arrival in Boston, I learned of Coach Middleton’s passing. I deeply regretted having missed seeing him before his death; and so I made it a priority to go out to Coach Rose’s home whenever I was back in Houston. [Read more…] about Coach Rose’s Tree