For the writing of the forthcoming book (2014) “A Whole New Engineer: A Surprising Emotional Journey” I was reflecting on the management and leadership influences in my life, and I had almost forgotten about Robert Townsend’s little book, Up the Organization. I went onto Kindle and ordered it (here), reread it, and renewed my acquaintance […]
In working as a coach, a topic that comes up frequently with clients is time. It comes up in different guises and claims. “I don’t have enough time to spend doing X,” where X may be something at work, a hobby, a project. “I don’t have enough to spend with Y,” where Y is a loved one, […]
I was a guest on Kate Ebner’s radio show Visionary Leader, Extraordinary Life, on Monday, and my Georgetown University coaching cohort colleague Nancy Lamberton was the guest host. The topic for the show was The Emotional Rescue of Engineering Education and the show abstract is reprinted below: Humans, with a population of 7 billion people and growing, increasingly depend […]
An Engineer in OD/HR Wonderland When I took training as a leadership coach at Georgetown University, many of my colleagues in cohort 30 were in human resources (HR) or organizational development (OD). As I had just resigned my tenure as an engineering professor at the University of Illinois, learning amidst these people was disorienting on […]
The use of executive or leadership coaches has become an accepted and widespread practice in private corporations, non-profits, and government, and the reasons are becoming clearer (here). When individuals are coached, they become more effective at work and at home with notable improvements in both their task & relationship orientation; organizations become more productive with […]
Since World War 2, we have lived in a world of experts and expertise, and for an expert, not knowing gets a bad rap. Actually, its worse than that. For an expert, the very idea of not knowing challenges one’s self-image, one’s entire story of oneself. After all experts are people who have learned and […]
After finishing up a post over at Big Beacon on Educating Wholehearted Engineers & Educators (here), I was reflecting about the notion of vulnerability and the ways in which we are vulnerable both publicly and privately. To summarize, the blogpost was a riff on Brene Brown’s Power of Vulnerability video (here) and the ways in which our willingness […]
I’m hosting a twitter chat on Holistic Engineering and Holistic Engineering Education on Wednesday. Join me and others interested in this important topic at 8pm by listening in to #BigBeacon on twitter. More information is available here.
My Georgetown colleague Ann Oliveri (here) posted this lovely short video the other day. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBRUBrWR2ZE The philosopher and early psychologist William James said that if we act as if something were already true that doing so immediately has an effect in reality. The video says this quite nicely with a number of different examples. I […]
María Teresa Morresi from AGIBTA Magazine (here) sent me a list of interview questions regarding engineering education. I shot back a quick reply, and I thought the spontaneity of my answers gave them a force that was worth sharing. Here is a somewhat edited version of her questions and what I wrote: AGIBTA: I became […]