Readwise favorites

I admit I can’t easily explain why a mere visit to a garden centre should have had such a curdling effect. It was just that the place seemed to combine a whole series of pet hates I never realised I had been nurturing until there they all were, one after another, somehow a part of my former self as a Briton back in the years before I took the

Temporary discomfort is an investment in your future self.

Like individual change, organizational change is also iterative and dynamic. I'm an avid student of Henry Mintzberg's work on organizational strategy.* He has a beautiful analogy to sculpture: you have your materials, and in the process of working with them you figure out how to deviate from your plan, to add and subtract. I think this depicts

Wisława Szymborska, poet and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature:

"Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life."

"Le Carré has suggested that espionage is a kind of metaphor; we all live undercover and mask our private selves with projected social personalities. “Most of us live,” he said, “in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.”"

"“CHAMPAGNE, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector,”

"A camera teaches people how to see without a camera"

Dorothea Lange

—In a meeting, job interview or important conversation, have something in mind you would like to say in conclusion to a point or that you really want to drop in. Make it short and easy to remember. Practise saying it slowly and deliberately. In every conversation, we all have something we really want to get across; in more formal conversations we

What are valid reasons for an organization to request coaching for an executive? Under what circumstances is it not appropriate to provide executive coaching?