The very first thing you are taught when you start practicing judo is how to fall. A breakfall – or ukemi – is a technique used to fall safely, without injuring yourself.
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We spend our days toiling at this or that, sometimes alone, sometimes with others. We know the proximate reasons for those everyday actions: we go to work because, well, we have to pay the bills; we interact with our colleagues because we have a job to do and that’s how you get things done.
I don’t know how much time you spend thinking about succession planning but I think about it a lot. In just a few days, as it does every September, our judo club will be welcoming
In her book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives, Professor Elizabeth Anderson of the University of Michigan makes a controversial statement about the nature of the corporation: The corporation, she asserts, is a totalitarian regime – a dictatorship. And she means this quite literally, not just as an analogy.
Ask yourself this question and answer it honestly — nobody need ever know how you answered: Do you find yourself being driven mostly by the necessity to abide by your duties and obligations, or by the desire to do your very best at everything you do?
As can be seen from the opening quote, adulation for top athletes is a universal phenomenon, its origin lost in the mist of time. Through our admiration, I believe, we pay tribute not only to the athlete’s achievement or performance, but also to what we see as exceptional moral desert.
Doing the right thing is not as easy as just saying it. It can often require real courage to do what is right, and humans are notoriously fallible in this front. But another, equally daunting obstacle stands in the way of what is good and just – one that we have likely been struggling with for as long as our species has had a notion of right and wrong: How exactly, pray tell, does one determine what is the right thing to do in a given situation?
Like most of us I think, I’ve always considered myself to be a nice and friendly person although in truth, very few people self-identify as jerks. I won’t go out with you for drinks after work, distribute high-fives all around while walking down the hall or greet you loudly at a function – that’s just not who I am.
I had an interesting experience a few days ago. I had just responded to somebody’s online comment regarding one of my articles right here on LinkedIn when I received the following message
In his influential book “After Virtue”, moral and political philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put forward the contentious view that professional managers within bureaucratic corporations – whether public or private – are intrinsically (by their very nature) amoral.
I often get asked about tips and tricks that people might leverage to help them stay focused and on task. Many people are good at staying focused and I certainly can’t lay any special claim to this. I’ve never conducted scientific research on the topic and what follows is the fruit of my own reflections, based on a combination of personal experience and exposure over time to a number of systems of traditional wisdom.
The university club where I teach judo to young adults is a great lab where I get to observe human behavior from up close and draw lessons and insight that have proved extremely instructive in other aspects of my life.
