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Episode 78: Rising Path With Ruben Rodriguez [The Amiel Show]

Episode 78: Rising Path With Ruben Rodriguez [The Amiel Show]

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This week’s guest, Ruben Rodriguez, is one of the most brilliant designers of learning experiences for leaders.

He’s also an old friend and trusted colleague.

Ruben is super funny. Yet he claims that I once advised him to tone down his humor.

Ruben is also smart and accomplished. But he’s so humble that I bought a special air pump to inflate his ego.

And although he doesn’t write books, he invents much better book titles than yours truly.

For these reasons and more, I hope you enjoy listening.

Highlights

  • 9:15 From apples to Apple
  • 19:00 I get to the essence of things
  • 35:30 Heart conversation: why are you here?
  • 42:45 Head conversation: what do you really think?
  • 49:00 Body conversation: what will do you and when?
  • 58:45 Growth conversation: what’s your next challenge?

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Episode 77: Presence-Based Leadership With Doug Silsbee, Part 2 [The Amiel Show]

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Doug Silsbee

This is part two of my interview with Doug Silsbee about his important new book: Presence-Based Leadership: Complexity Practices for Clarity, Resilience, and Results That Matter. Part one is here.

In this portion of the interview, Doug walks us through the core of his book: the nine window panes through which you can view leadership. It is a complex model and therefore eminently practical, because it matches the complexity in which we live.

It is also a serious and illuminating synthesis, one that invites all of us into a rich experience of what is right there before us.

Please take your time over the next sixty seconds to start listening—and then share with your peeps.

Highlights

  • 6:30 We are highly trained to look outside us, but not within us
  • 9:00 The meaning and limitation of legacy
  • 14:00 What identity am I unconsciously seeking to perpetuate
  • 20:00 Doug guides you to draw the nine panes (not while driving, of course!)
  • 24:00 A business example that brings it alive
  • 37:00 Regulating your inner state
  • 42:00 Embodying what matters to us

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Episode 76: Presence-Based Leadership With Doug Silsbee, Part 1 [The Amiel Show]

Episode 76: Presence-Based Leadership With Doug Silsbee, Part 1 [The Amiel Show]

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Doug Silsbee

Doug Silsbee joins me this week to discuss his remarkable new book: Presence-Based Leadership: Complexity Practices for Clarity, Resilience, and Results That Matter.

The book, like Doug himself, is a grounding presence, a heart-felt invitation, and a wise synthesis. He meets you where you are—offering practical insights and clever experiments to try—and calls you to sink a bit deeper into the place from which your life-force arises.

I was honored to speak with Doug. Within the first few minutes of the interview, you will learn why.

This is the first of two interviews with Doug. The next will appear a week from today.

Please listen and share widely.

Highlights

  • 9:00 Art is creating what you don’t yet know
  • 21:30 Today’s practicalities and why we are here both matter
  • 29:00 It is audacious to be an offer in the world
  • 31:00 What shapes our identity
  • 36:00 In meetings, everyone lives in their own bell jar
  • 39:00 Three levels of scale: context, identity, and soma
  • 44:00 Three meta-competencies: sensing, being, and acting

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Episode 75: Stomping the Blues, Reimagining American Identity with Greg Thomas [The Amiel Show]

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Fasten your seatbelts. This week, we’re going on a rollicking, rhythmic, high-minded, and heartfelt ride through the core of the American experience.

Greg Thomas, our guide through the True but Partial Challenge on race and, more recently The Jazz Leadership Project with Jewel Kinch-Thomas, joins me again to steer us through this week’s journey.

Or should I say: journeys?

That’s how much territory we cover. Greg even coaxes me to steer out of my “interviewer lane” and riff on my own experience stomping the blues.

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The focus of our conversation is Albert Murray, the great 20th century American writer and close colleague of Ralph Ellison.

Haven’t heard of him? Neither had I until a few months ago.

But since when did lack of fame mean anything about a person’s wisdom?

Like me, you will learn to take Albert Murray seriously. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison does. She wrote, “Murray’s perceptions are firmly based in the blues idiom, and it is black music no less than literary criticism and historical analysis that gives his work its authenticity, its emotional vigor, and its tenacious hold on the intellect.”

Like me, you will get mesmerized by the ideas in Murray’s first book, The Omni-Americans. Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates wrote in his New Yorker profile of Murray (“The King of Cats”) that the book was “so pissed-off, jaw-jutting, and unapologetic that it demanded to be taken seriously.”

Highlights

  • 6:00 Albert Murray’s influence on American culture and art
  • 13:30 American identity synthesizes multiple roots
  • 20:00 Murray’s devastating critique of “ghettoologists” and “safari technicians”
  • 35:00 Decoding ancient fairy tales and applying them to life today
  • 39:00 The blues idiom as life compass
  • 43:00 The hero’s journey in American cultures, e.g. Harriet Tubman
  • 46:00 Hero’s journey is an alternative orientation from Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Baldwin
  • 55:30 We fear difference and are attracted to it. Can we integrate this into ourselves?
  • 59:00 The Jazz Leadership Project
  • 1:10:00 Apprentice, journeyman, and master

 

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Next Tuesday we’ll stomp the blues

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Allow me to entice you.

Next Tuesday at 10am PST, the second to last day of Black History Month, check your email inbox.

I’ll give you an interview about the most important American writer on culture you’ve probably never heard of.

Unless your name is Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard, who called this writer “The King of Cats.”

Or Toni Morrison, who said, “Murray’s perceptions are firmly based in the blues idiom, and it is black music no less than literary criticism and historical analysis that gives his work its authenticity, its emotional vigor, and its tenacious hold on the intellect.”

  • Name: Albert Murray
  • Focus: Hero’s journey, stomping the blues, critiquing “ghettologists,” appreciating that black culture is central to American culture
  • Quote: “The blues idiom is an attitude of affirmation in the face of difficulty, of improvisation in the face of challenge. It means that you acknowledge life is a low down dirty shame yet confront that fact with perseverance, with humor, and above all, with elegance.”
  • Our guide: Greg Thomas, former jazz columnist for the New York Daily News

Tuesday at 10am. It will lift you up.

Episode 74: Whites’ Self-Interest In Opposing Racism With Diane Woods [The Amiel Show]

Episode 74: Whites’ Self-Interest In Opposing Racism With Diane Woods [The Amiel Show]

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You support Black Lives Matter and oppose racial discrimination because you want to help black people. If you have light skin, you can’t get much more noble than that, right?

Not quite. According to this week’s guest, leadership coach and retired executive Diane Woods, the idea that white people need to be altruistic toward blacks is itself a racist idea.

Huh?

Yes, you read that correctly.

In fact, as Diane explains, white folks have an intelligent self-interest in opposing racist ideas and embracing all of us as equally capable and worthy human beings.

I’ve known Diane for almost two decades. She hosted a book club I joined. Back then, I saw her as a fountain of wisdom and curiosity, and over time, those qualities have only grown.

Please join me in this second episode in my new series on the American experience with race. If you enjoyed my conversation last week with Greg Thomas—or, heck, even if you haven’t yet—you’ll want to tune into this one.

Please share with friends and colleagues so we can carry Diane’s voice far into the conversation around race and culture.

Highlights

  • 5:00 Why Ta-Nehisi Coates and Diane weren’t surprised by white supremacists marching
  • 9:00 Diane’s spiritual teacher’s blind spot around race
  • 15:00 Evolution of race work over 50 years
  • 20:00 Crafting herself to look good for white corporate America
  • 31:00 Despite injustice, my inner life is mine and I will defend it
  • 35:00 “They just don’t want us here”
  • 41:00 “I may say racist things but I’m pure on the inside”
  • 49:00 Racism is corrosive for white people
  • 1:02:00 Whites freeing themselves from the burden of racism
  • 1:05:00 Countering racism is in whites’ intelligent self-interest

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Episode 73: Five Pivotal Thinkers On Race With Greg Thomas [The Amiel Show]

Episode 73: Five Pivotal Thinkers On Race With Greg Thomas [The Amiel Show]

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This week, writer and public speaker Greg Thomas, CEO of the Jazz Leadership Project, helps me launch a new podcast series on the American experience of race.

Greg provides a refreshing and nuanced take on a complex topic. Listen to him, and you will find that race is not just a political issue or a moral quandary. It also provides a rich opportunity to grow as a leader and live life fully. Whether you consider yourself white, black, Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, or just plain Human, dive in with Greg, and you will come out a bit wiser and a lot more curious. Race is not what you think it is.

I met Greg through our shared interest in integral approaches to leadership, culture, and politics. When approaching topics with our “integral” fedoras on, we bring a mix of curiosity and critique. Rather than pick sides, we like to ask, “How is each perspective true, yet also partial? What wisdom does it offer, but also what are its blinders?”

In this conversation, we apply the integral lens to race in America. I call it the True But Partial Game. We explore five leading American thinkers on race. For each, I ask Greg to describe the both the wisdom they offer, and the perspectives that, if meshed with their own, would create a more accurate and pragmatic path forward.

What if we acknowledged both the systemic forces that constrain and the personal gifts and virtues that liberate?

Highlights

  • 1:00 Why a series on race in America?
  • 7:30 Interview begins
  • 15:30 Integral view of race and culture
  • 22:00 “So-called black people” and “so-called white people”
  • 26:30 Whiteness harms white folks
  • 31:30 Ta-Nehisi Coates—brilliant, bleak, and still growing?
  • 41:30 Kimberle Crenshaw, “intersectionality,” and victimhood
  • 46:00 Oppression is not a death sentence
  • 50:00 bell hooks—love and the beloved community
  • 1:01:00 John McWhorter—linguist and refreshing independent thinker
  • 1:06:00 Cornel West—brilliant, influential, and stuck in critique

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