Tag Archives: reinvention

Learning to live with complexity

We are up against it, aren’t we?

The world moves so fast, changes so much, and disrupts so often, that most of our instincts and many of our strategies are just plain wrong.

We are obliged to manage a contraction.  

On the one hand we want to stay steady, grounded, true to mission, maximizing as much continuity as we can.

On the other, we want to create new ideas and behaviors, to spot disruption and reply in kind.  

Niether of these is easy.  Doing them together is really, really hard.  

In a new essay, Stanford’s brilliant Ed Batista gives a glimpse of how a coach can help.  It’s a wonderful piece reinventing coaching in order to reinvent the corporation.

See read the essay, click here. 

Photo acknowledgment: Thanks to D’Arcy Norman for the magnificent photo which appears in Batista’s post.  

Multiple selves and alternate realities: from Goldman Sachs to Earth 2

The new film, Another Earth, is about the sudden appearance of a new planet, floating in the heavens, not very far away (as pictured).

It is, apparently, a second earth that duplicates our own. They call it Earth 2.

“Who is your other you?” the film asks.

Once more popular culture, drawing from string theory, among other things, contemplates transformational options and multiple selves.

But it is not just popular culture that cares about the theme. It turns out the writer, star, and producer, Brit Marling, began her professional life as an analyst at Goldman Sachs.

So she knows a thing or two about multiple selves and alternate realities.

Of course, Marling’s earth 1 (investment banking) and her earth 2 (Hollywood) are not duplicates. Being a citizen in good standing in both of them takes an unusual person, real transformational range, and a daunting act of reinvention.

It’s kind of wonderful that after Marling made the transition she wrote this filmic Valentine to alternate realities and the process of moving between them.

References

For more on the theme have a look at my book Transformations 

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