Inspiratie en verdieping

Om continue te blijven groeien en innoveren, laten wij ons graag inspireren door anderen.
Hieronder vind je een aantal voorbeelden van denkers, sprekers en schrijvers die ons aanspreken op het gebied van leiderschap, onderwijs, organisatie en persoonlijke ontwikkeling.
Onze blog vind je onderaan deze pagina.

Naar beneden - Academic Vision

Leiderschap

Nederland zoekt Leiders (boek)

Nederland zoekt Leiders (boek)

In een tijd waarin de maatschappij en onze levensomstandigheden in hoog tempo veranderen, is de roep naar leiderschap luider dan ooit. John Schrederhof, Nederlands bekendste expert op het gebied van leiderschapsontwikkeling, schets in dit inspirerende boek een helder beeld van de leiders die we in grote aantallen nodig hebben om de uitdagingen waar we voor staan het hoofd te bieden. Het boek dient als een routekaart en inspiratiebron voor iedereen die leiderschap wil ontwikkelen in zichzelf en bij anderen.

 

 

Bildung (scheurkalender)

Bildung (scheurkalender)

De Bildung scheurkalender bevat 365 inspirerende gedachten voor het betere onderwijs.

Ook Alies Zijlstra leverde een bijdrage en liet zich hiervoor inspireren door Fredric Laloux.

Leading from the emerging future (book)

Leading from the emerging future (book)

Our Time Is Now

We have entered an age of disruption. Financial collapse, climate change, resource depletion, and a growing gap between rich and poor are but a few of the signs. Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer ask, why do we collectively create results nobody wants? Meeting the challenges of this century requires updating our economic logic and operating system from an obsolete “ego-system” focused entirely on the well-being of oneself to an eco-system awareness that emphasizes the well-being of the whole. Filled with real-world examples, this thought-provoking guide presents proven practices for building a new economy that is more resilient, intentional, inclusive, and aware.

Both writers are connected to the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the Presence Institute.

Echte leiders dienen (boek)

Echte leiders dienen (boek)

Leiderschap is enorm in beweging. Dat het anders moet dan in de 20ste eeuw zien de meeste mensen wel. Maar hoe anders en hoe doe je dat? Dienend-leiderschap wordt in dit kader steeds vaker genoemd. Wat is dienend-leiderschap? Welke effecten heeft het? Waarom is het een antwoord op de problemen waar we voor staan? En hoe geef je er handen en voeten aan? Op basis van wetenschappelijk onderzoek geeft Inge Nuijten antwoorden en praktische inzichten waarmee je direct aan de slag kunt.

Dus, wie een boek zoekt om concreet handen en voeten te geven aan het begrip dienend-leiderschap, kan met dit boek zijn hart ophalen. Het boek staat bol van de tips en ontwikkelingsvragen voor het ontwikkelen van dienend-leiderschap. Zoals bewustwordingsvragen en tips om meer verbondenheid in jouw team te creëren.

Kortom, als je je wilt ontwikkelen tot dienend-leider krijg je hier volop concrete tools om mee aan de slag te gaan. Daarbij komt één belangrijk aspect steeds terug: dienend-leiderschap is een levenshouding, geen trucje…

The moral bucket list (artikel)

The moral bucket list (artikel)

Organisatieontwikkeling

Reinventing organizations (boek)

Reinventing organizations (boek)

Nederlandse editie van de internationale bestseller die wereldwijd een omslag in het denken over organisaties teweegbracht. De auteur, consultant die organisaties adviseert over een fundamenteel andere managementaanpak, kantelt het oude beeld van bedrijven naar een nieuw model voor organisatie en leiderschap.

Moderne organisaties lijken vast te zitten in een verouderd stelsel. Werknemers raken gedemotiveerd, ondernemers zoeken naar een ander soort management, vertrouwde modellen schieten tekort. Kunnen we op die manier eigenlijk nog wel verder? Reinventing organizations biedt een antwoord. Het boek laat zien hoe we aan het begin staan van een nieuw tijdperk. Daarin dragen belangrijke doorbraken bij aan een diepere voldoening voor management, medewerkers en klanten. Hoe breng je je eigen authenticiteit terug in je werk? Hoe eenvoudig kan een organisatie weer zijn? Wat kun je bereiken door met een gezamenlijk en breed gedragen doel te werken? Met een veelvoud aan praktijkvoorbeelden en inspirerende getuigenissen biedt Reinventing organizations een venster op de organisatie van de toekomst. Dit boek is een aanrader voor wie nieuwe manieren van werken en leven wil begrijpen en combineren. Een theoretische en praktische handleiding voor wie de kracht van vrijheid, vertrouwen en wendbaarheid optimaal wil benutten.

Theorie U (boek)

Theorie U (boek)

Theorie U gaat over persoonlijk leiderschap, met als kernvraag: Hoe kan ik als mens een volstrekt eigen bijdrage leveren aan de maatschappij, die tegelijkertijd aansluit bij wat de omgeving echt nodig heeft? Otto Scharmer nodigt ons uit om de wereld op een nieuwe manier te zien. Waar en hoe we onze aandacht inzetten is de sleutel tot wat we cre ren. Hetgeen ons vaak weerhoudt om ‘in het nu te zijn’, is wat Scharmer onze blinde vlek noemt, een plek in ons innerlijk waaruit we handelen. Het is van het grootste belang om ons van deze blinde vlek bewust te worden. Door het U-proces te doorlopen leren we in contact te komen met ons ware zelf. Scharmer noemt dit ‘presencing’, ’to sense and bring in the present one’s highest future potential’, ofwel het hoogst haalbare toekomstige potentieel waar te nemen en in het nu te realiseren. Theorie U wordt daarom gezien als h t nieuwe managementboek van deze tijd: niet uitgaan van het verleden, maar uitgaan van hoe de toekomst zich in het nu manifesteert! Inmiddels werken wereldwijd vele organisaties en adviseurs volgens Theorie U.

The fifth discipline (boek)

The fifth discipline (boek)

Peter Senge, founder and director of the Society for Organisational Learning and senior lecturer at MIT, has found the means of creating a ‘learning organisation’.

In The Fifth Discipline, he draws the blueprints for an organisation where people expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nutured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are contually learning together. The Fifth Discipline fuses these features together into a coherent body of theory and practice, making the whole of an organisation more effective than the sum of its parts.

Mastering the disciplines will:
*Reignite the spark of learning, driven by people focused on what truly matters to them.
*Bridge teamwork into macro-creativity.
*Free you from confining assumptions and mind-sets.
*Teach you to see the forest and the trees.
*End the struggle between work and family time.

The Fifth Discipline is a remarkable book that draws on science, spiritual values, psychology, the cutting edge of management thought and Senge’s work with leading companies which employ Fifth Discipline methods. Reading it provides a searching personal experience and a dramatic professional shift of mind.

This edition contains more than 100 pages of new material about how companies are actually using and benefiting from Fifth Discipline practices, as well as a new foreword from Peter Senge about his work with the Fifth Discipline over the last 15 years.

Presence (boek)

Presence (boek)

Persoonlijke ontwikkeling

Bring Your Whole Self To Your Work (boek)

Bring Your Whole Self To Your Work (boek)

In today’s work environment, the lines between our professional and personal lives are blurred more than ever before. Whatever is happening to us outside of our workplace—whether stressful, painful, or joyful—follows us into work as well. We may think we have to keep these realities under wraps and act as if we “have it all together.”

But as Mike Robbins explains, we can work better, lead better, and be more engaged and fulfilled if—instead of trying to hide who we are—we show up fully and authentically.

Mike, a sought-after motivational speaker and business consultant, has spent more than 15 years researching, writing, and speaking about essential human experiences and high performance in the workplace. His clients have ranged from Google to Citibank, from the U.S. Department of Labor to the San Francisco Giants. From small start-ups in Silicon Valley to family-owned businesses in the Midwest. From what he’s seen and studied over the years, Mike believes that for us to thrive professionally, we must be willing to bring our whole selves to the work that we do.

Bringing our whole selves to work means acknowledging that we’re all vulnerable, imperfect human beings doing the best we can. It means having the courage to take risks, speak up, have compassion, ask for help, connect with others in a genuine way, and allow ourselves to be truly seen. In this book, Mike outlines five principles we can use to approach our own work in this spirit of openness and humanity, and to help the people we work with feel safe enough to do the same, so that the teams and organizations we’re a part of can truly succeed.”This book will offer you insights, ideas, and tools to inspire you to bring all of who you are to the work that you do—regardless of where you work, what kind of work you do, and with whom you do it. And, if you’re an owner, leader, or just someone who wants to have influence on those around you—this book will also give you specific techniques for how to build or enhance your team’s culture in such a way that encourages others to bring all of who they are to work.”

Stop calling them soft skills (blog)

Stop calling them soft skills (blog)

They might be skills, but they’re not soft

Are you good at your job?

Different, easier question: Was Ty Cobb good at baseball?

Ty Cobb: Competitive Jerk

The apocryphal story is that Ty Cobb was a jerk. His teammates didn’t like him very much. But he’s still in the Hall of Fame. That’s because baseball keeps score… of hits, of runs and of catches.

What about your job? It’s probably a bit more complex.

There are linchpins, people who don’t shirk responsibility when the chips are down. And, among others, there are connectors, people with insights, folks who never seem to lose hope. Your company is staffed with people who can’t possibly be rated on a linear scale, because you’re not baseball players. You are managers and inventors and leaders and promise-makers and supporters and bureaucrats and detail-oriented factotums.

And yet…

And yet we persist in hiring and training as if we’re a baseball team, as if easily defined skills are all that matter.

What causes successful organizations to fail? Stocks to fade, innovations to slow, customers to jump ship?

We can agree that certain focused skills are essential. That hiring coders who can’t code, salespeople who can’t sell or architects who can’t architect is a short road to failure.

These skills — let’s call them vocational skills — have become the backbone of the HR process.

But how to explain that similar organizations with similarly vocationally-skilled people find themselves with very different outcomes?

By misdefining ‘vocational’ and focusing on the apparently essential skills, we’ve diminished the value of the skills that actually matter. Most of the textbooks business students experience and the tests business students take are about these vocational skills, the checkboxes that have to be checked.

But we give too little respect to the other skills when we call them “soft” and imply that they’re optional.

It turns out that what actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes and perceptions of the people who do the work.

Culture defeats strategy, every time.

And yet…

Organizations spend a ton of time measuring the vocational skills, because they can. Because there’s a hundred years of history. And mostly, because it’s safe. It’s not personal, it’s business.

We know how to measure typing speed. We have a lot more trouble measuring passion or commitment.

Organizations give feedback on vocational skill output daily, and save the other stuff for the annual review if they measure it at all.

And organizations hire and fire based on vocational skill output all the time, but practically need an act of the Board to get rid of a negative thinker, a bully or a sloth (if he’s good at something measurable).

Theft

If an employee at your organization walked out with a brand-new laptop every day, you’d have him arrested, or at least fired. If your bookkeeper was embezzling money every month, you’d do the same thing.

But when an employee demoralizes the entire team by undermining a project, or when a team member checks out and doesn’t pull his weight, or when a bully causes future stars to quit the organization — too often, we shrug and point out that this person has tenure, or vocational skills or isn’t so bad.

But they’re stealing from us.

What can we teach?

Along the way, we’ve confirmed that vocational skills can be taught (you’re not born knowing engineering or copywriting or even graphic design, therefore they must be something we can teach), while we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to decision making, eager participation, dancing with fear, speaking with authority, working in teams, seeing the truth, speaking the truth, inspiring others, doing more than we’re asked, caring and being willing to change things.

We underinvest in this training, fearful that these things are innate and can’t be taught.

We call these skills soft, making it easy for us to move on to something seemingly more urgent.

We rarely hire for these attributes because we’ve persuaded ourselves that vocational skills are impersonal and easier to measure.

And we fire slowly (and retrain rarely) when these skills are missing, because we’re worried about stepping on toes, being called out for getting personal, or possibly, wasting time on a lost cause.

Which is crazy, because infants aren’t good at any of the soft skills. Of course we learn them. We learn them accidentally, by osmosis, by the collisions we have with teachers, parents, bosses and the world. But just because they’re difficult to measure doesn’t mean we can’t improve them, can’t practice them, can’t change.

Of course we can.

Let’s call them real skills, not soft.

Yes, they’re interpersonal skills. Leadership skills. The skills of charisma and diligence and contribution. But these modifiers, while accurate, somehow edge them away from the vocational skills, the skills that we actually hire for, the skills we measure a graduate degree on.

So let’s uncomfortably call them real skills instead.

Real because they work, because they’re at the heart of what we need to today.

Real because even if you’ve got the vocational skills, you’re no help to us without these human skills, the things that we can’t write down, or program a computer to do.

Real skills can’t replace vocational skills, of course not. What they can do is amplify the things you’ve already been measuring.

Imagine a team member with all the traditional vocational skills: productive, skilled, experienced. A resume that can prove it.

That’s fine, it’s the baseline.

Now, add to that: Perceptive, charismatic, driven, focused, goal-setting, inspiring and motivated. A deep listener, with patience.

What happens to your organization when someone like that joins your team?

Work to be done

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Lou Solomon reports that 69% of managers are uncomfortable communicating with their employees. The only surprising thing about this statistic is how low it is.

How do we build people-centric organizations while also accepting the fact that two-thirds of our managers (presumably well-paid, well-trained and integral to our success) are uncomfortable doing the essential part of their job?

In a recent survey, the Graduate Management Admission Council, the folks who own the GMAT exam, reported that although MBA’s were strong in analytical aptitude, quantitative expertise, and information-gathering ability, they were sorely lacking in other critical areas that employers find equally attractive: strategic thinking, written and oral communication, leadership, and adaptability.

Are these mutually exclusive? Must we trade one for the other?

An Encyclopedia of Real Skills

The fact that there isn’t an accepted taxonomy of real skills demonstrates just how little effort organizations large and small have put into finding, improving and developing real skills among their teams.

In this first draft, we’ve chosen five large categories and then given examples of each. Not a definitive taxonomy, but a start, a way to move the conversation and the investment forward.

The five categories might include:

Self Control — Once you’ve decided that something is important, are you able to persist in doing it, without letting distractions or bad habits get in the way? Doing things for the long run that you might not feel like doing in the short run.

Productivity — Are you skilled with your instrument? Are you able to use your insights and your commitment to actually move things forward? Getting non-vocational tasks done.

Wisdom — Have you learned things that are difficult to glean from a textbook or a manual? Experience is how we become adults.

Perception — Do you have the experience and the practice to see the world clearly? Seeing things before others have to point them out.

Influence — Have you developed the skills needed to persuade others to take action? Charisma is just one form of this skill.

Self Control

Adaptability to changing requirements

Agility in the face of unexpected obstacles

Alacrity and the ability to start and stop quickly

Authenticity and consistent behavior

Bouncing back from failure

Coach-ability and the desire to coach others

Collaborative mindset

Compassion for those in need

Competitiveness

Conscientiousness in keeping promises

Customer service passion

Eagerness to learn from criticism

Emotional intelligence

Endurance for the long haul

Enthusiasm for the work

Ethics even when not under scrutiny

Etiquette

Flexibility

Friendliness

Honesty

Living in balance

Managing difficult conversations

Motivated to take on new challenges

Passionate

Posture for forward motion

Purpose

Quick-wittedness

Resilience

Risk-taking

Self awareness

Self confidence

Sense of humor

Strategic thinking taking priority over short-term gamesmanship

Stress management

Tolerance of change and uncertainty

Productivity

Attention to detail

Crisis management skills

Decision making with effectiveness

Delegation for productivity

Diligence and attention to detail

Entrepreneurial thinking and guts

Facilitation of discussion

Goal setting skills

Innovative problem-solving techniques

Lateral thinking

Lean techniques

Listening skills

Managing up

Meeting hygiene

Planning for projects

Problem solving

Research skills

Technology savvy

Time management

Troubleshooting

Wisdom

Artistic sense and good taste

Conflict resolution instincts

Creativity in the face of challenges

Critical thinking instead of mere compliance

Dealing with difficult people

Diplomacy in difficult situations

Empathy for customers, co-workers and vendors

Intercultural competence

Mentoring

Social skills

Supervising with confidence

Perception

Design thinking

Fashion instinct

Map making

Judging people and situations

Strategic thinking

Influence

Ability to deliver clear and useful criticism

Assertiveness on behalf of ideas that matter

Body language (reading and delivering)

Charisma and the skill to influence others

Clarity in language and vision

Dispute resolution skills

Giving feedback without ego

Influence

Inspiring to others

Interpersonal skills

Leadership

Negotiation skills

Networking

Presentation skills

Persuasive

Public speaking

Reframing

Selling skills

Storytelling

Talent management

Team building

Writing for impact

And then, the two questions

  1. Is it possible to teach these real skills? Is it possible to focus on them, hire for them, reward for growth? Can we put in place programs and insights that will lead to progress in all these areas?
  2. If we did, would it matter? Would an organization that excelled at these real skills be more productive, more profitable and a better place to work?

Which leads to: What are we waiting for?

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (boek)

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (boek)

De zeven eigenschappen van effectief leiderschap’ behoeft nauwelijks nog introductie; het vormt al jarenlang en wereldwijd een inspiratiebron voor iedereen.

Covey heeft met zijn zeven eigenschappen een miljoenenpubliek bereikt. Hij leert ons hoe we de kwaliteit van ons werkende leven, privé-leven en gezinsleven kunnen verbeteren. Zijn inzichten hebben duizenden mensen in staat gesteld meer plezier en zin te ervaren in hun omgang met anderen; dit heeft het werk in duizenden organisaties en bedrijven prettiger en effectiever gemaakt.

Zijn filosofie is van alle tijden en blijkt steeds weer nieuwe generaties aan te spreken.

Wat is jouw of jullie wens voor verdere ontwikkeling?  

Neem graag contact met ons op!