Great Work Interview: Lance Secretan, leadership expert
Dr. Lance Secretan is one of the world’s foremost thinkers about leadership.
He weaves together different strands of experience to bring his knowledge to the world, having been a CEO of a Fortune 100 company, an acclaimed business school professor and an accomplished skier. Of his fourteen books, I’ve been most influenced by his recent ones, Inspire! and One: The Art and Practice of Conscious Leadership and the way they have focused on the concept of higher ground leadership. Lance has won the International Caring Award and the McFeely Leadership Award.
In this interview Lance and I talk about:
- The CASTLE principles – six fundamentals concepts that underlie higher ground leadership
- The power of love in organizations – and why it’s not “California woo-woo” stuff
- How to harness the art of focus to tackle big challenges
- What it means to unlearn – and why it’s critical for future success
You can follow Lance at his blog
Great Work Interview Laura Berman Fortgang
Laura Berman Fortgang is truly one of the pioneers in the personal coaching field. She has a number of books to her name including Now What?: 90 Days to a New Life Direction and her most recent The Little Book of Meaning (and no doubt you can immediately see why Laura’s such a great fit with great work.)
Laura was one of the very first personal coaches to be featured on national television including an appearance on Oprah. And on top of running a company that provides coaching and training, she is also an ordained interfaith minister.
In our conversation we:
- hear about the moment that shifted her to expand her practice from coaching to training as a minister – and the importance of listening to the call of Great Work
- get into why “meaningful work” isn’t all about becoming Mother Theresa – but finding it in the life you currently live
- talk about how your schedule tells you more about your life than you’d care to admit
The interviews are all between 25 and 30 minutes long.
You can either download them here as mp3s, or go to iTunes, type in “Great Work Interviews” and you’ll see them all there.
You can follow Laura on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@LBFcoach
Great Work Interview – Jonathan Fields of Career Renegade
Jonathan’s job title is Chief Renegade Officer. And it’s not just a fancy title. Jonathan spent time as a mobile DJ, a hedge fund lawyer and a highly successful entrepreneur in the health business starting up his own yoga studio. He’s taken that hard-earned wisdom and written a best-selling book Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love and is building a community of people who want to “work happy and live well” at CareerRenegade.com, you’ll see the subtitle there, the thing that sums up the site, is “work happy, live well”.
In this interview you’ll hear:
- how Jonathan made the biggest leap in his entrepreneurial career – on September 10th 2001 (and what he did about it)
- talk about the one big question that should frame your next career move (and yes, it’s a classic Great Work question)
- tackle the whole topic of courage – what it is and what it isn’t
- learn what it really means when someone says, “You can’t do that!”
You can follow Jonathan on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@jonathanfields
Great Work Interview – John McWade
I remember years ago Tom Peters raging on about the importance of design. And, as usual with Tom, he was right on the money. Because content and knowledge is now ubiquitous and free, design becomes absolutely critical to adding value and creating something of worth. It’s no longer content and then some token thought about design. The design is a significant part of the content.
That’s why I’m so delighted to have spoken to John McWade. For decades he’s been at the forefront of design in publishing. He currently publishes the brilliant Before & After magazine, which on a regular basis shares practical tips on graphic design. In doing so, he’s drawing on experience that started when he was the very first user of Aldus PageMaker – a program that grew up to become Adobe – and he founded the first desktop publishing company.
In our conversation we cover
- the genius of Apple and their design (and it’s not just their cool gadgets)
- how John knows when a piece of work is complete
- the starting point for any project – design-led or otherwise – and the big question you need to ask
- a fundamental principle of design which you can use in planning everyday life, not just a magazine cover
- John’s three word mantra for brilliant design – and for that matter, Great Work
You can connect with John at www.BAMagazine.com
The interviews are all between 25 and 30 minutes long.
You can either download them here as mp3s, or go to iTunes, type in “Great Work Interviews” and you’ll see them all there.
The interviews are all between 25 and 30 minutes long.
You can either download them here as mp3s, or go to iTunes, type in “Great Work Interviews” and you’ll see them all there.
Great Work Interview – Robert Fritz
I have two shelves put aside for my iconic Great Work texts. These are reserved for the books and the authors who I think have written something timeless and significant in how we can show up and do the work we should be doing. Peter Senge’s there. So is Peter Block.
And both these guys point to today’s guest, Robert Fritz, and say he’s a giant in this field. Actually, he’s a giant in two fields. He spends some of his time working with large organizations. And he spends some of that time as a composer and creator in the arts field, both making music and making films. You can see the dual focus by the titles of his books. One, The Managerial Moment of Truth. Another, Your Life as Art.
In this wide-ranging discussion we talk about
- How Robert frames Great Work – be true to yourself – and what that real means
- The fact that organizations are amoral – what that means, and in particular what that means to you as a member of that organization
- Why “problem solving” is so seductive for managers – and how it gets in the way of Great Work
- The fundamental design of organizations, why that matters and what their real purpose is (it’s not “shareholder return”)
You can connect with Robert at www.RobertFritz.com
The interviews are all between 25 and 30 minutes long.
You can either download them here as mp3s, or go to iTunes, type in “Great Work Interviews” and you’ll see them all there.
