The purpose of this blog - share ideas on how to empower in politics, business, life
I have started this blog as a way to create something that may be of value to you – if, like me, you are curious how to empower in ...
Politics: enhance the power of people to take responsibility for how they want to live together
Business: simplify your organization and empower your team
Life: this is the foundation of everything and unexpectedly (at least for me for a long time) linked to the above: how to find fulfillment and balance in one's own life
It's a way to share ideas that I come across – perhaps you find them meaningful. It's a way to clarify my own thinking, by actually putting thoughts into words and committing them to paper (and '1's and '0's). It's a way to create something – as a balance to and complement to consuming others' thoughts, a.k.a. reading, which I perhaps do more than is good for me.
What are those ideas I am likely going to share?
One way to answer this: anything to do with what I spend most of my time doing – consulting organizations trying to simplify their structure & processes or navigating significant change; training and coaching consultants, managers, activists to empower them to empower others; reflecting on my own thinking, emotions and choices as the basis to grow as a person. Empowerment is the common thread running through all these activities.
Another way to answer the question: by looking at what I read, which can be anything from philosophy (Ancient Greek/Roman, Bertrand Russell, Kierkegaard, Zen/Tao), politics (political campaigning, biographies of the great political leaders, visions for a European federation), history (esp. those like Yuval Noah Harari or Paul Kennedy who take a birds-eye view to history) to health (sleep, nutrition, mindfulness) and finances. The list changes as interests evolve, but it's certainly less the daily ups-and-downs of the news cycle that I want to comment on, but more the enduring ideas and how they can be applied to specific situations in politics, business and life.
But what grabs my attention more than any particular area or topic is the links between them, the parallels and overlaps, the metaphors and conclusions applicable to more than one field – and the potential for creating something new from that space. While for a long time this looked to me only like intellectual curiosity, it is recently that I have realized how this applies to my own life and work. Some examples:
Applying ideas from military strategy & tactics to a political campaign
Applying ideas that motivate & commit people to volunteer for a cause to empowering employees to support a difficult yet necessary transformation program including cost reduction
Applying ideas from psychotherapy and Stoicism to taking risks in life
And I am curious to see what else there is.