Great Read Excerpt: The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge
Irene Becker, www.justcoachit.com

Recently updated, The Fifth Discipline is a must read for leaders who seek to make positive changes in their organizations and in their own lives. Mr. Senge concentrates on five disciplines critical to the development of a Learning Organization. (Mental Models, Systems Thinking, Team Learning, Shared Vision and Personal Mastery).

“Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human.  Through learning we re-create ourselves.  Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do.  Through learning we re-perceive that world and our relationship to it.  Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life.”

 “The earth is an indivisible whole, just as each of us is an indivisible whole.  Nature (and that includes us) is not made up of wholes within wholes.  All boundaries, national boundaries included are fundamental arbitrary.  We invent them and then, ironically we find ourselves trapped within them.”

“As the world becomes more interconnected and business becomes more complex and dynamic, work must become more ‘learningful’…“Without a systematic orientation, there is no motivation to look at how the disciplines interrelate.  By enhancing each of the other disciplines, it continually reminds us that the whole can exceed the sum of its parts.“

This seminal book is important to the understanding of growth cycles, control cycles, and delays (feedback loops) that impact all systems; helping us to see successes and failures with new eyes that can help us avoid patterns of defeat.

The Fifth Discipline by Peter. M Senge,
Revised Edition, Doubleday 2006

Irene Becker, www.justcoachit.com

What Does Leadership Really Mean?

Irene Becker | Just Coach It-The 3Q Edge™ | 3Q Leadership Blog
Helping smart people and organizations move forward smarter, faster, happier

“Leadership is a big word with such a broad, deep, and pervasive meaning. You know it when you see it. You know when it is missing. Good leaders distill complexity into the things that matter most. That’s what Irene has done in this blog. Anyone who is working on improving their leadership ought to keep these tenets close by.”
  John Richard Bell, Former CEO of Jacobs Suchard, Kraft, Nabob

Leadership means seeing the challenges we face with new eyes; eyes that ignite passion, purpose and potential at the speed of change, in the face of multiple challenges and incredible opportunities.  Leadership means  building the solution focused collaboration, communication, ideation. It means building a new bridge, a stronger bridge between what is and what can be; a bridge that will help guide us from the Age of Information to the Age of Innovation.

Leadership means building communities of thought and action. It means developing learning and living organizations with new ways of seeing, thinking and communicating that drive enhanced ideation and action-ability (IQ)  improved communication, collaboration, leadership, emotional resiliency (EQ) and a strong alignment with the universal values that are the critical underpinning of sustainability and success (SQ). (The 3Q Edge™)

Leadership means satisficing, will no longer work.  Satisficing, a word coined by Nobel Lauriate Herbert Simon, means doing what is adequate. Doing what is adequate is no longer enough.  Satisficing will not help us to find new ways, better ways to become more positive and solution focused; ways of thinking, communicating and doing that can help us actualize our potential to transform challenges into solutions, difficulties into opportunities.

Leadership means harnessing our power to build a new and better future.  It starts in an alignment of head and heart, in an optimization of our true passion, purpose and potential. It starts by looking at the walls, the challenges, the hurdles we face with new eyes that take us forward faster, better and happier.  It means embracing the courage, faith, integrity and humanity, the Q strengths, that can help us use what is to create what can be in our life and the lives of others.

Click on blue text for More 3Q™ Leadership Posts:
3Q Leadership and REACH Benefits
Mission Critical:  Championing, Empowering and Enabling Our Ability to Win
Goodness to Greatness Leadership-7 Steps from Me to WE
The Thriving Organization: Ten Power Steps Out of Jurassic Park
The Leadership Compendium

Irene Becker | Just Coach It-The 3Q Edge™
Helping smart people and organizations move forward smarter, faster, happier
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A Powerful Story About Getting Back On Track When You Have Hit a Wall

 Helping smart people & organizations communicate & lead forward smarter, faster, happier is what I do best
© Irene Becker | www.justcoachit.com | 3Q Leadership™ Blog

Brain science concurs that the power of our thoughts is significant in a multiplicity of ways that impact our lives, our work, our ability to reach past what is and create what can be.   In many ways we become our words and our thoughts.

This  story was told to me by Peter Reinhart, Chief Marketing Officer, Wizz Marketing, a man whose integrity, creativity and courage inspire me!   I am a sharing it because there is nothing that hits home like a good story!

Discouraged?  Frustrated?  Perhaps You Have Hit A Wall? Part of the course in race car driving has students going around a hairpin turn at high speed. Teaching students how to negotiate hairpins turns is a critical part of their training.

Imagine…. a huge concrete wall at end of straightaway with a hairpin turn taking you in the opposite direction to another straightaway. Students are instructed – Don’t look at the wall – look to where you need go.

90% of the students start out and do what?… Look at the wall… Guess how many hit the wall?… every one of them! Over the course of weeks they are drilled and drilled on not focusing on the wall but looking down the inside of the track and around the corner to the next straightaway. The wheels are screaming. The rubber is burning. The wall is scary close. They learn that where you focus is where your car will go.

Eventually they get better and better at focusing on where they need to go and stop looking at wall. Once they accomplish that skill the speed they can take the corner gets faster and faster. It is not that wall doesn’t exist – race car driving students just refuse to focus on it.

The key lesson is – Focus on where you need to go – stop looking at the wall…. You will hit whatever you focus on.  As long as you focus on avoiding the wall – the higher the probability that you will hit that wall!  It is almost as if you give your demon life. Stop breathing life into your demon-stop focusing on the wall! Don’t verbalize it. Don’t focus on it. Don’t allow it to exist in your brain. If a wall exists it doesn’t matter. What should you do?  Focus on where you need to go.  Focus on the straightaway right behind the turn. Focus on the inside of the track. Point your car where you want to!

At a time when challenges abound, in an era where there will be a continuity of change, challenges and opportunities…hope lies in retraining our brain to be solution focused, to see the walls we face with new eyes.  Eyes that take us forward, faster, better and happier!  Pie in the sky?  Think again. Click on the blue text, learn how I honed my ability to move forward faster, better and happier when I hit a number of BIG walls.   Think about your ability to move past the walls you face.  Carpe diem, because the power to use the challenges we face to drive solutions is REAL, it is the power of our 3Q Edge™

Is it time to REACH- Redirect-empower-actualize-communicate and harvest YOUR potential to lead forward?
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