Be Greater. Do Good. Every Day. Change Forward!
“Would you have sex with a person whom you knew for certain had AIDS and your only protection was a condom?” That was not a question I had expected, though I had responded to plenty of difficult questions in the preceding three hours of the meeting.
Correctly learning and using the names of people is still one of the easiest and best strategies in community building and community change. Each of us can do it and we can do it all by ourselves. The only permission we need is the permission of the person whose name we are trying to learn and use.
Comedian and former host of the Late Late Show, Craig Ferguson once offered three communication tips in a popular stand-up comedy performance. They are strangely applicable to collaboration leadership…as well as having a happy relationship.
I have a confession to make. I attend Tamarack’s Collective Impact Summits for very selfish reasons. I have come to experience and appreciate the annual event as a personal retreat. Okay, it is a personal retreat taking place in the midst of several hundred people. Never forget the words, though, of the world famous Anonymous … Read more
On Tuesday (September 29) at the CI Summit 2015 in Vancouver, Fay Hanleybrown and Mark Cabaj shared a dialogue in the morning plenary about arriving at shared measures in Collective Impact (CI). It was a terrific conversation and they did a really nice job of parsing out the difference between shared measures and evaluation. Working … Read more
Here we go again. It is the Quadrennial Quest for the next “great” leader of the United States. It is too bad we are fixated on a Presidential leadership model that has not worked well in the recent past and increasingly holds little hope for the future. Are we ready to embrace a different approach … Read more
An emphasis on using “evidence based practices” is stifling experimentation. This was the statement I posed in a poll within my last blog, back in February 2015, just before I got sucked into a vortex of Federal grant writing from which I am only now extracting myself. The results are in and a full 77% … Read more
Today I am doing something I do not usually do and it is not something I plan to do as a habit. I am publishing the same brief article I wrote for my newsletter as a blog, though I have expanded on it a bit more here. My sole reason for doing so is that … Read more
I’m a really lucky guy. I got to spend a week with my Canadian friends earlier this month and, once again, they both affirmed and pushed my thinking. Boy, did they affirm and push! The occasion was Tamarack’s inaugural Collective Impact Summit in Toronto. Featured plenary speakers included Melody Barnes, John Kania, Brenda Zimmerman, and … Read more
Recently a friend of mine told me that I’m “hopelessly Midwestern” and he is right. In fact, I’m not only hopelessly Midwestern, I’m proudly hopelessly Midwestern. To learn more about this condition, click on the link above and enjoy The String Doctors as they explain it to you. I can, though, explain one thing it … Read more