Finding Merlin

Kate Cowie

Informations

• Publié par: Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) PTE LTD
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814398831
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright Kate Cowie 2012
Published by Marshall Cavendish Business An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International
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The right of Kate Cowie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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eISBN 978-981-4398-83-1
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION
ONE . The PATH through the FOREST
TWO . GIANTS and DRAGONS
THREE . The KNIGHT ADVENTUROUS
FOUR . A MAGICIAN for a GUIDE
FIVE . The FOREST of ADVENTURE
CONCLUSION

NOTES
AFTERWORD
FOREWORD
Science, Myth and Metaphor
Growing the Self in Today s Organisations

The changing context for human and professional development.
Human development in organisations is being redefined in what Tom Friedman so cogently described as our flat world . The flat world is speed, 24-hour always on business processes, and instant communication via Blackberry, iPhone, Tweets and a growing number of social communication technologies. In the flat world, global competition is multiple diverse stakeholders, hyper-competition, disruptive technologies, tipping points and feedback cycles that quickly reward success and punish failure. Old concepts, like the hierarchy of needs, and Theory X and Theory Y, seem somehow incomplete and long in the tooth in an age that so often links its metrics for human value directly to the bottom line. The flat world is an exciting, challenging and sometimes risky world in which to live and work. Kate Cowie, through science, mythology and metaphor, explores the nature of human development in contemporary organisations, and how to do it.
In the flat world, human and professional development are increasingly conjoined. An underlying premise of Cowie s thinking is that one cannot be an accomplished professional in the flat world without also bringing a highly developed whole Self to the work. Accordingly, she offers a foundational framework for finding our way towards purposeful human development. She lays the groundwork for an informed practice of human development in contemporary organisations and links it to professional success. It is a timely perspective and a substantial contribution to our efforts to make work life meaningful in the flat world.
The challenge of development in a flat world.
Organisational life in the flat world is demanding. It is fully engaging and often exhausting. High performance demands the best of human capabilities - technical excellence, emotional intelligence, nuanced leadership, imagination, inspiration, smart risk-taking, broad vision, courage, and the ability to learn from successes and mistakes. Far-reaching ecologies of interdependence among organisations, the environment, finance, and personal and family life require vision and sensitivity to the second-and third-order impacts of organisational action. Higher-order functioning is not just valuable - it is critical for survival in the flat world.
Paradoxically, driven by the demands of their corporate environments, flat-world organisations are often inhospitable petri dishes for human development and growth. In the industrial, round world of the past, life-long employment was assumed and investments in human and professional development were seen as integral to long-term success. Human resource departments took responsibility for the short-and long-term development of individuals to serve corporate needs. There was often time and money for experiments in learning, sometimes even for play. In the flat world, employer and employee make no promises for the long term. Investments in human development are assessed based on their marginal contributions to profits. In the flat world, organisations strive to be lean and human resource departments manage human capital . Time is truly money in the flat world, and more apt to be spent by employee and employer alike to meet unyielding short term demands rather than invested for the less pressing, longer-term benefits of human growth. Individual contributors and leaders are too often sucked into the corporate vortex. As a colleague, Earl T. Braxton, characterises it, they get too far in , unable to maintain the perspective (and position) that allows for the capability to be effective managers of organisational purpose, strategy and execution.
The metaphors we live in.
One of the useful insights of the post-modern focus on narrative is the notion that we live our lives in metaphor. It is a provocative proposition. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe the power of metaphor in our lives:
Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish - a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people....
Lakoff and Johnson s work with metaphor suggests a caution, and a possibility. The caution: lacking awareness of the metaphor in our lives, we risk living on auto-pilot, programmed with the software of our particular historical epoch. The possibility: mindful of metaphor s influence on our life experience, we can make it a friend to our desire for self-development, a window on how we can reflect upon, and reshape, the language we live by. Cowie offers us the opportunity to use the powers of metaphor in mythology - linked to a science-grounded framework - to support our own journey of self-understanding and development.
Gareth Morgan shows us the reflective power of metaphor as a means to understand organisations. Images of Organizations , his classic work on organisation theory, has helped students of organisations see multiple dimensions of organisational life through metaphorical lenses. For example, he presents provocative pictures of organisations as machines, brains, psychic prisons and instruments of domination. In a later book, Imaginization: the Art of Creative Management , he illustrates how we can play with our metaphors - extending, reshaping and reframing them to discover new possibilities for understanding and action.
The flat world has found in business and capitalism a common language. Its underlying assumptions serve as universal indicators of individual and corporate success and progress towards the collective good . We utilise technology and financial and human capital to produce products and services that are purchased by customers who are categorised in market segments. We focus on profit, competitive position, business strategy and the bottom line. Indicators of personal success are higher status, more responsibility, and larger salaries. The language of contemporary business, like the organisations it reflects, is lean! It is bereft of the range, the colour, the density of the enriching, generative languages of the arts - spirit, morality, service, chivalry, passion, stewardship. In the flat world, this is the language of philanthropy. The stories of Arthur s court that Cowie re-tells so engagingly remind us of the metaphorical blind spots that lean language leaves in our corporate venues and, perhaps, as corporate language increasingly seeps into our larger public discourse, in our personal and civic lives as well.
Human growth: left-and right-brain lenses.
Cowie explores human development using both hemispheres of our brains. Through a left-brain lens she builds a carefully documented map of modern knowledge and thought about the human development process and how our growth journeys can be supported. Relying heavily on social science research, she describes the human development process as a series of growth phases. Each phase provides its own unique challenges, opportunities for trial and error, for support from others, and for lessons learned about universal growth themes. Each phase is a building block towards greater capability in more complex environments. Cowie reminds us that growth is a natural human drive, a process that, while n