Recharge with these continuing education opportunities

Several colleagues and clients have asked about places to recharge, regroup and rejuvenate. Here's a list of continuing education opportunities for change agents, leaders, creatives and everyone coping with the complexities of life.

Systems Thinking Conference, Nov 17-19, 2008, Boston
Sponsored by Pegasus -- helping individuals, teams, and organizations thrive in an increasingly complex world.

NTL Institute provides management training programs that enhance listening skills, communication skills, diversity, organization development and group dynamics. In Alexandria, VA and Bethel, ME.

Shambhala Institute is a vibrant meeting-place of people, practices, and ideas engaged at the frontier of organizational and societal change. Upcoming workshop is Organizational Trust: Cultivating authenticity, commitment and collaboration, April 22–23, 2008 in Ottawa, Ontario. Next summer institute is Authentic Leadership in Action, June 22–28, 2008 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Robert Fritz, composer, filmmaker and organizational consultant, helps people and organizations create the results that matter to them. Public workshops in Newfane, VT include Your life as art, Creating for creators, Fundamentals of Structural Thinking.

Cape Cod Institute is a summer-long series of timely/lively week-long courses for mental health and management professionals, offered by master teachers in Greenwich, CT.

Omega Institute is a pioneer in exploring, teaching, and embracing new ideas, focusing on health and wellness, personal spiritual growth, and self-awareness. Summer programs in Rhinebeck, NY. Winter programs in Costa Rica, Northern California and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Sol — Society for Organizational Learning. Founded by Peter Senge, SoL discovers (research), integrates (capacity development) and implements (practice) theories and practices of organizational learning for the interdependent development of people and their institutions and communities. In Boston.

Appreciative Inquiry is a revolutionary approach to strategic change and sustainable growth for organizations. The Commons, an online resource, lists public workshops, conferences and certification programs available world-wide.

Executive Education at Case Western in Cleveland, OH offers programs in Appreciative Inquiry and emotional intelligence.

Action Design helps individuals and groups in organizations develop their capability for inquiry, choice, and action on their most difficult issues. Public workshops in Boston.

Taos Institute is a community of scholars and practitioners concerned with the social processes essential for the construction of reason, knowledge, and human value.

Interaction Associates offers workshops in facilitation, leadership, meeting management, change management, coaching, and trainer excellence. Public workshops are in San Francisco, Boston, Dallas, Chicago, Washington DC.

OD Network is a professional association of external consultants and professionals working within their organizations to promote healthy change. Next conference is Oct 19-22, 2008 in Austin, TX.

All of our continuing education bookmarks are at http://del.icio.us/unison/continuing-education.

Add to the list. Click on "Comments" below and add your favorite workshop, conference, "chill-out" retreat.

Evelyn Glennie: How to listen to music with your whole body

Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie leads the audience through an exploration of music not as notes on a page, but as an expression of the human experience. Playing with sensitivity and nuance informed by a soul-deep understanding of and connection to music, she talks about a music that is more than sound waves perceived by the human ear. She illustrates a richer picture that begins with listening to yourself, and includes emotion and intent as well as the complex role of physical spaces -- instrument, concert hall and even the bones and body cavities of musician and listener alike.

From TED.

The Beatles principles

No time for reflection, beeping BlackBerrys, and a grind-it-out mechanistic process. Where's the time for fun to build creative, motivated teams?

Client loyalty expert Andrew Sobel writes about a team that learned to deliver the highest-level of performance while having fun at a legendary scale — the Beatles. Four ordinary guys found a way to achieve extraordinary artistic and financial success and have a great time together while they were doing it.

Sobel has distilled 10 principles for improving creativity and innovation based on the Beatles' creativity and team work:

1. Eight Days a Week — Face Time: Invest in and build face time between team members well before they are asked to pitch to a client.

2. Getting Better — Evolving Your Songs: Evolve your “songs” and bring the same level of ideas, new perspectives, excitement, and enthusiasm to your hundredth meeting with a client that you brought to the first.

3. Nowhere Man — Practicing Humility: Cultivate humility and self-effacement in your dealings with others, especially when you’re on the heels of great success.

4. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da — Using Humor to Connect: Use humor, especially self-deprecating humor, to ease tensions, show you are human, and create an emotional connection with colleagues and clients.

5. With a Little Help from My Friends — A Role for Everyone: Help team members become brands-within-a-brand by giving them a song — an idea or proposal — that will help them to shine.

6. Here Comes the Sun — Honing Your Opening Measures: Carefully craft the first 60 seconds of all your communications — the opening measures of your songs — to command your audience to listen.

7. P.S. I Love You — Liking Your Public: Show your public — your clients, in every interaction, that you truly like them.

8. Two of Us — Sharing the Credit: Create a one-for-all, all-for-one culture by fostering a “Lennon/McCartney” equal-credit environment for teams.

9: Revolution — Having Conviction: Make sure your communications resonate with passion, belief, and sincerity — with conviction — if you want to be noticed by busy executives.

10: I Need You — Greatness from Differences: Put exceedingly diverse professionals on the same team, mix specialists with generalists, and foster friendly competition to produce the best ideas.

Andrew Sobel is a leading authority on building client relationships and is the author of business bestsellers Making Rain: The Secrets of Building Lifelong Client Loyalty and Clients for Life: How Great Professionals Develop Breakthrough Relationships. His Beatles Principles article first appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Strategy+Business.

A pdf of the article can be downloaded at Sobel's Web site — andrewsobel.com.

When culture gets stuck

"Classical music wasn't always 'classical,'" writes change agent Seth Godin.

Once something makes its way to the mass market, the mass market doesn't want it to change. And once it moves from that big hump in the middle of the market to become a classic, the market doesn't just want it to not change, they insist.

So classical music gets stuck because the new stuff isn't like the regular kind, the classics. French food got stuck, because no restaurant could risk its 3 stars to try something new. A convention can't change cities or formats. Schools can't start their curriculum over... the culture gets stuck because the masses want it be stuck.

Inside most fields, we see pitched battles between a few people who want serious change to reinvigorate the genre they love -- and the masses, who won't tolerate change of any kind.

Read more plus reader reactions in Seth's blog.

IDEO: deans of design

When you're the chief executive officer of one of the planet's most influential design firms, you can't help but notice compelling design-such as the object in which IDEO's Tim Brown and a visitor are sitting this summer morning. Right inside the front door of the two-story lobby at IDEO's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters is a 5-foot-high, open-roofed, Corian-shelled, cylindrical micro-conference room. It's sort of a 21st-century version of a yurt, the sturdy, all-weather tent of the Mongolian nomads.

The yurt is not an IDEO design, though. Brown spotted the Steelcase-created prototype at a design show last year and just had to have it. Yet the technoyurt represents a core IDEO design principle: creating something tangible as a launching pad for further exploration and innovation. "It's not talking about what may be; it's actually creating and building it," Brown says. "Something you can walk into. It's that ability to make new ideas tangible that makes design useful."

Read the US News article.

Tough love

Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman B-school, looks at the tension between business-as-usual and business-by-design.

By focusing on the intuitive and experiential, organizations explore new sources of competitive advantage. By looking to the provable and replicable, organizations better exploit the innovations they've brought to market.

To prosper over the long run, a company needs to succeed at both. It must mesh the classical workings of a traditional organization with the prototypical features of a design shop, especially in three key areas: reckoning the future, organizing work, and establishing status and rewards.

Read the FastCompany article.

The hunt for innovation

Desperate to innovate, companies are turning to design schools for nimble, creative thinkers. Instead of asking a business school for help, Mozilla turned to Stanford's "D-school," as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design is termed on campus.

A B-school class would have started with a focus on market size and used financial analysis to understand it. This D-school class began with consumers and used ethnography, the latest management tool, to learn about them.

Business school students would have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to consumers.

B-school students would have stopped when they completed the first good product idea. The D-schoolers went back again and again to come up with a panoply of possible winners.

Read the Business Week article.

Gestalt at gettyimages.com

Play with inkblots at gettyimages.com.

Seth Godin: Marketing creativity

Seth Godin writes about the two things that kill creativity — fear and lack of inspiration.

I believe that every single person I've met in this profession is capable of astounding creativity. That you, and everyone else for that matter, is able to dream up something radical and viral and yes, remarkable. So why doesn't it happen more often? Sure, fear is a big part, but it's also a lack of imagination.

Read more on Seth's blog.

What business are you in?

In the October 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review comes classic advice from Theodore Levitt.

Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others that are thought of as seasoned growth industries have actually stopped growing. In every case, the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.

The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented.

People actually do not buy gasoline. They cannot see it, taste it, feel it, appreciate it, or really test it. What they buy is the right to continue driving their cars. The gas station is like a tax collector to whom people are compelled to pay a periodic toll as the price of using their cars. This makes the gas station a basically unpopular institution. It can never be made popular or pleasant, only less unpopular, less unpleasant.

Reducing its unpopularity completely means eliminating it. Nobody likes a tax collector, not even a pleasantly cheerful one. Nobody likes to interrupt a trip to buy a phantom product, not even from a handsome Adonis or a seductive Venus. Hence, companies that are working on exotic fuel substitutes that will eliminate the need for frequent refueling are heading directly into the outstretched arms of the irritated motorist.

In order to produce these customers, the entire corporation must be viewed as a customer-creating and customer-satisfying organism. Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing customer-creating value satisfactions. It must push this idea (and everything it means and requires) into every nook and cranny of the organization. It has to do this continuously and with the kind of flair that excites and stimulates the people in it. Otherwise, the company will be merely a series of pigeonholed parts, with no consolidating sense of purpose or direction.

What business are you in?

Read more from Theodore Levitt.