With this post the name of this long-standing blog is changed from "The Organizational Development Muse" to "The Third Turn.” The focus on the intersection of organizational and executive development remains, but much more for the benefit of the mature and soaring executive—those leaders focused on future value and legacy. The re-titling of this blog is part of a larger initiative for maestro-level leaders being launched this fall.
Even if you are among the declining numbers of persons who have a salary with benefits, you would be wise to heed Peter Drucker’s prescient insights about what would happen in a knowledge-based economy. He long ago pointed out that we would need to become our own brand and think like entrepreneurs. We cannot assume someone or something will provide for us.
I can remember the effects of International Harvester pulling out of my home town of Fort Wayne, Indiana: the long, difficult years of high unemployment for the blue collar neighborhood that surrounded the congregation I pastored and the way a strong community fabric fractured and frayed. Some folks found their way through; many did not.
In my view, this is what normal is. We are always in a brave and new world. An old normal is not gone. A new normal is not emerging. Normal is change, adaptation, struggling through to figure it out. Figure it out we must. This is certain to include a deeper understanding that we are responsible to take care of ourselves, to bring tender compassion to those unable to do so, to build up our communities, and to prepare a better world for our descendants. We cannot assume we will be provided for by government or employer. We bring ourselves to a world that might not bring itself to us, and we have to deal with it.
"Dealing with it" is what successful entrepreneurs do. Now, as much as ever, we will benefit from nourishing our inner entrepreneur.
Design Group International has been around for twenty years, an early entrant into the embrace of knowledge work in a gig economy as a virtually connected organization. What so many are now calling a new way of working caused by the Pandemic is the life we’ve lived all along; the current moment is simply a deeper step by many businesses and business leaders into the world we have been inhabiting.
Some of the great benefits people are discovering, alongside the difficulties of changing so rapidly, are:
- deeper movement into an integrated life, rather than the continuous exhaustion of keeping everything compartmentalized
- renewed awareness of what long-term sustainability entails and the benefits it brings, rather than all the reoccurring problems attached to short-termism
- new commitment to fulfilling an organization’s mission as the most important success measure, rather than relentless focus on meeting near-term objectives of a three-year strategic plan
- awakening to humanity's and creation’s flourishing as a return on investment, rather than a business expense we try to reduce
- becoming more open to learning, adaptation, and innovation and making that our trade, rather than trying to sell variations of products we already have or do not need
Integration. Sustainability. Mission. Flourishing. Openness.
More of that, please!
If you would like some companionship in “figuring it out,” of course we’d love to join your conversation. Our long-time and long-lived starting point after all is that it begins with design.
I walk alongside leaders, listening to understand their challenges, and helping them lead healthy organizations that flourish.
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