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excellence

Episode 6: James Flaherty on How People Change and Where Excellence Lives

Episode 6: James Flaherty on How People Change and Where Excellence Lives

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James Flaherty taught me how to coach, created the organization where I met my wife, and challenged me to grow myself as a person.

That’s quite an influence for one person, don’t you think?

In Episode 6 of The Amiel Show, I had the privilege to talk with James about some big stuff I’ve learned from him. We discussed:

  • 3:00 So much of our experience is an interpretation versus a fact “out there”
  • 8:20 Why self-observation is as important as 360 feedback
  • 13:30 Truly changing involves our bodies, social worlds, and language
  • 24:00 Excellence is evoked in relationship rather than something we create alone
  • 30:30 Aristotle’s notion of excellence, including all parts of ourselves
  • 35:45 What’s up with emotions in our culture
  • 43:00 Executive presence happens in the body
  • 51:50 What James is deliberately practicing to develop himself

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How To Idiot Proof Excellence [January 2012]

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It’s now been thirty years since Peters and Waterman published In Search of Excellence. As Art Kleiner, Editor of strategy + business, has pointed out, this book brought into the mainstream the notion that building a successful company requires more than simply managing the numbers. Since then, hundreds of books and articles have examined the topic of excellence in organizations and individuals. This month, I present my modest contribution to that conversation: how do we idiot-proof excellence?

Idiot-proofing means designing something so that even a person of low intelligence would use it properly. In my experience, there are few bona fide idiots in the world. In fact, if you subscribe to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, everyone is smart at something. Thus, calling anyone “stupid” or an “idiot” is, well, stupid.

Yet I would also assert that there is an idiot within each of us. To be specific, the magnificent human brain contains a part that acts more like a reptile than a homo sapiens. It responds to external events by fighting, fleeing, or freezing. This “survival brain” is very effective at protecting us from genuine harm, yet it also gets activated when no true physical harm is present. A variety of wonderfully mischievous behaviors result. [Read more…] about How To Idiot Proof Excellence [January 2012]