About This Blog

I am an avid reader, and although it’s generally seen as a solitary pursuit, I have also always taken a lot of pleasure from sharing ideas that I’ve found between the pages of great books.  Professionally, I have done this through coaching conversations with my clients, relaying knowledge and resources that I felt could help them with specific needs or challenges.  More recently, however, I found myself journaling, sometimes daily, just to keep up with the flow of insights and ideas that brimmed out of me in reaction to what I’d been reading. This is the genesis of this blog:  looking at my journal, I’ve decided that it is time to share the knowledge, ideas and resources I’ve been discovering with a wider audience.  I’m buoyed to do this by the enthusiastic reaction of my coaching clients.  

This blog therefore features books that are about or at least somehow related to the world of work – its interesting trends, inspiring ideas and the changing knowledge one needs to thrive.

 

Trends

Today’s workplace demands more creativity, flexibility and management skills than we’ve ever needed before, no matter what our role. Whether we like it or not, we are all now in the business of sales and marketing in addition to whatever else we might be doing. Uh oh, we’re also in the business of human resources, sustainability and design. Oh! And in the business of art, of course.  If that was not enough, as a coach, I just have to point out that we are all in the business of coaching, and I strongly believe that we should all be in the business of philanthropy. It is a mouthful, isn’t it? And it can be overwhelming.

If the downside is needing to stay abreast of thinking across multiple areas and risking information overload, the upside is that we can acquire a broad set of skills that can be also applied to strengthen other aspects of our life - as parents, spouses, partners, friends and others - we can use them daily.

 

Knowledge

To be most effective, those skills should be part of the fabric of who we are - a philosophy, a way of looking at things, even a lifestyle, rather than learned tricks and tactics. The good news is that with the right amount of deliberate practice, reflection and, ideally a great, dedicated coach, knowledge can become a muscle over time. 

Ideas

With learning at its core, this is a blog that is going to be appreciated by Life-Long Learners. But to take this further, it is also for those who recognize that the future lies in the hands of workers who are able to bring together a broad spectrum of ideas and thoughts, and use them in a fresh, innovative, out of the box way. I mean, in other words, Conceptual Workers, what Daniel Pink calls the new breed – the meaning makers, pattern recognizers, dot connecters, synthesizers. In essence, those who support traditional L-Directed Thinking with high concept (“ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, detect patterns and opportunities, craft a satisfying narrative, combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention”) and high touch abilities (“ability to empathize, understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others”).

 

And since I am an Executive Coach and coaching happens through conversations, this is really what this blog aspires to be with time – a conversation with the readers on the subjects concerning the future of the world of work and how to shape it.