“I have a piece of paper that I’ve kept for more than twenty years. On it are two questions. ‘What do you want?‘ and ‘What are you willing to do to get it?’” said Sylvia Ferrell-Jones, President and CEO of the YWCA of Boston. Ms. Ferrell-Jones is a community leader who is advancing Greater Boston’s understanding of social justice and change. She and I happened to be guests at a dinner party of a mutual friend. Her comments emerged during a discussion among attendees about her organization’s goals: to serve Boston’s neighborhoods where health, education and safety inequities are most significant. It is against these formidable challenges that she measures progress. Continue reading…
Transition Approach: certain versus confident
I remember a great NPR piece from the summer of 2009. I was driving in traffic, my typical commute. Eight miles in 55 minutes. The discussion’s topic was leadership. The reason it caught me was that it described leadership in two simple yet separate buckets; certain or confident. It hit me because I think that every leader I have ever worked under would think of herself or himself as confident when in fact they were more often certain. I wonder if this simple dichotomy works in transition as well? Continue reading…
Little known transition attributes: courage & silence
“I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on,” said Steve Jobs in his much-quoted commencement address to Stanford University in June 2005. He was speaking about dropping out of college and then hanging around campus to explore courses that appeared interesting to him but Continue reading…