Organisational Wisdom

Why is the getting of success such a struggle, when everywhere we look, others make it seem so easy? "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something", said the man in Black to his one true love Buttercup in the classic 1981 movie The Princess Bride . No great success was ever achieved without pain. And to make the key changes in our lives - to shift from being worriers to warriors - takes effort, heroic effort. Just like the Native American story of the battle between the two wolves. One wolf is slothful, cowardly, vain, arrogant, and full of self-pity, sorrow, regret, envy, and anger. The other wolf is diligent, courageous, humble, benevolent, and full of compassion, joy, empathy, an faith. Which wolf wins the battle? The one you feed. Whether you feed your good wolf, your source of diligence and courage, or your bad wolf, your source of sloth and fear, is a daily choice, and in many cases a heroic choice. Here are five questions to cons...

"Patience, young grasshopper" is a quote from the 1970's Kung Fu TV series starring David Carradine as Kwai Chang Cain. His teacher, Master Po called him "grasshopper" as a child, emphasising patience as the ultimate martial arts skill. But we live in an era of high-speed, same-day, cutting-edge, first-to-market, fast-food, get-it-now, snap-judgement. If we're told we have to wait, we get irritated. If we can't come up with the right answer right away, we get upset. if someone or something gets in our way, we get angry. Why is patience considered one of the most powerful martial arts practices? Because patience is the antidote to anger, and anger represents the most terrible and destructive manifestation of self-driven desire. When we're angry with someone, we're estranged form them and from the true core of our being. We end up losing the very thing we believe we're fighting for. Patience is a discipline. It takes practice to over...

Groucho Marx famously said, "the secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made!" It's easy enough to acknowledge the benefits of ethical behaviour - in principle. But the practice of business, government, and community affairs is often at odds with what seems "right". The number 1 reason for ethical violations in business is the pressure to meet expectations, sometimes unrealistic expectations. So how do you develop and sustain the ethical self-discipline to stand firm when all about you are bending? The second practice for living life wisely is the virtue of ethical self-discipline. There are three kinds of ethical discipline: 1.  The moral discipline of restraint from non-virtue , in particular: Do not kill - instead, support life in all its forms as much as possible. Do not steal - which means to not knowingly gain from another's misfortune or ignorance. Do not deceive - which means to be honest...

To live in the first quarter of the Twenty-First Century in any global city is to be plugged-in, relevant, and responsive. To be out-of-the-loop even on holidays can feel intolerable. How can you expect to lead a wise life when there's so much noise and disruption? There are 5 practices for living life wisely. The first of these is the gift of generosity. True generosity is giving everything you have to every moment without expecting any sort of return. But how can you seriously do that in a competitive, materialistic, narcissistic, me-first culture? Here's how: Getting Started Once you overcome an inbuilt protectiveness about your own survival and material wealth it's relatively easy to be generous. You can begin right now, where you are, to be more compassionate and giving to others in your thoughts, words, and deeds. If you continue this process, it quickly becomes apparent how good it feels and how valuable it is. The Remedy of Generosity When you look at it...

In these times when innocent people are slaughtered for "causing offence" we don't hear much about wisdom. When was the last time you heard a political leader stress the social importance of wisdom or speak about the need for more of it? Yet across time and cultures, wisdom has been viewed as our most reliable guide to action, a key to the advancement and integration of knowledge, and a principle human virtue linked to long-term fulfilment and wellbeing. For me, wisdom is the balanced use of reason, intuition and compassion to make and encourage good decisions that promote human flourishing. How can we cultivate wisdom? Here are six qualities you can practice to become wise. 1. Richness of Knowledge A wise person tends to have what Paul Baltes and colleagues call "an extensive database about life matters". He or she is also likely to have "rich procedural knowledge" - many different ways of thinking about problems and their possible solution...

When we evaluate others' decisions and performance we tend to focus on results. A manager whose project has a good outcome is applauded, while a manager whose project fails might get fired. You can't argue with success! Or can you? When things go well we tend to put it down to skill, and when things go badly we put it down to bad luck. Taking success as a direct indicator of the value of an action is unwise. Why? Every human performance is a combination of skill, and that of outside forces – unpredictable events, uncontrollable conditions, random noise – in short, luck. And luck plays a role, sometimes more sometimes less, in every human endeavour.  We don't naturally consider the contribution of luck when evaluating performance. We have a strong bias to explain behaviour in terms of actions, such as skill. It takes a lot of effort to consider the contribution of external forces such as luck. That means that in many cases we tend to reward people for successf...

Not all decisions are wise. Deciding on that dividend re-investment offer just before the global financial crisis. Setting up a business partnership expecting the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. Believing lycra is slimming. We think we make wise decisions. But that's because we're good at post-facto rationalisation. The truth is we make far more foolish decisions than wise ones, we just don't see it at the time. So, how can you improve your odds of making the "right" decision next time? For the past 4 years my business colleague, Dr Barry Partridge and I have been researching that question. We received funding from the NSW Department of Innovation and Technology in conjunction with the University of Wollongong. And now we think we have an answer.  It turns out that each of us has a preferred style of processing the available information prior to making a decision. This reflects our unconscious bias, and explains why we all believe w...