The Courage of Children

My wife and I took a trip to New Orleans recent­ly. On a tour bus we passed William Frantz Pub­lic School. Do you know the sig­nif­i­cance of that school?  Ruby Bridges was 6 years old when she was select­ed to attend the school, the only black stu­dent, by virtue of the order to deseg­re­gate schools […]

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June 15, 2022 – 4:02 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Changing the World, Transformation | Comments (0)

Ambiguity, Organizational Stress and Leading Well

Back in the late 1980’s when I was doing recon­nais­sance into how well peo­ple were speak­ing up in orga­ni­za­tions, there were two main behav­iors by lead­ers that peo­ple told me caused them to become care­ful about express­ing them­selves. One was abra­sive behav­ior by lead­ers — shout­ing, crit­i­ciz­ing, insult­ing or oth­er­wise under­min­ing peo­ple. The oth­er leadership […]

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April 18, 2022 – 2:50 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Power, Trust, Undiscussables | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

On Helping Each Other

It would seem like a sim­ple thing — in our work we should help each oth­er rather than com­pete. We should rein­force one anoth­er’s con­tri­bu­tions, not tear them down. And yet how good at this are we actu­al­ly? It’s fun­ny how the com­pe­ti­tion — for cred­i­bil­i­ty, for worth — can leak out of us in […]

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April 2, 2022 – 3:45 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Changing the World, Consciousness, Healing, Wounds | Comments (4)

On Pretty Much Being Swiss Cheese

For sev­er­al months I have blogged noth­ing because I have been engaged in the sin­gle largest project of my career: writ­ing 360 degree reports for all 21 man­agers in a small orga­ni­za­tion against a tight, three month dead­line.  The effort intend­ed to give every man­ag­er of peo­ple for this tech­ni­cal­ly dom­i­nat­ed orga­ni­za­tion insight into their […]

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March 29, 2022 – 4:14 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Choices | Comments (0)