Greetings -  

I hope you, your family and friends are all well!

As I noted in the last edition, we have decided to accelerate the sale of our lovely little home in Alameda. As of this writing, we have vacated our abode and relegated the majority of our worldy possessions to the confines of storage. Staging and other preparations commence this week for our early May listing. 

I am writing today from the first stop on our nomadic odyssey. I am in the backyard of our Airbnb, which overlooks a small, family owned vineyard in the town of Windsor, CA (just a short drive south from Healdsburg, CA.) The sun is out and the wind and rain are at bay...for now. We are here for the week and enjoying our time in this lovely part of the Sonoma wine country.

Our travels in the coming weeks will take us back and forth between Healdsburg and Alameda, with stops along the way for work and fun in Austin, Portland, Chicago and Paris (assuming the garbage has been collected by then). Quite a ride ahead and a bit of a self-induced whirlwind - exciting, destabilizing, thought-provoking and more, as much change is being compressed into a narrow window. I am sure I will have more reflections in the coming months. We will miss the East Bay, Alameda in particular, and we are very excited for this next chapter! 

Spotlight Article

Our leadership needs to be as "bias-free, elastic, deft and dynamic as the circumstances rapidly unfolding around you and your organization." [And there are plenty of circumstances rapidly unfolding daily in both the macro and micro contexts!]

Active listening, whether demonstrated in a crisis or in the daily demands of leading, expands our perspectives in the pursuit of learning and growth. It frees us from our dependence on echo chambers, mitigates bias and reduces pre-conceptions. This reinforces a culture of psychological safety, one that values our professional gifts and motivates us to aspire for excellence in our work.

Thoughtful, holistic leaders intentionally solicit a range of varied stakeholders and information sources, infuse their decision-making with these perspectives and architect the necessary systems and processes that enable ideas to be identified and acted upon. Listening generously is a gift we can both give and benefit from.

I am also including an array of other reading and listening. Diverse in content and sourcing, these pieces offer a variety of perspectives that piqued my curiosity and desire to learn more. The Articles section marks the first of several in the coming months featuring pairs of perspectives on a given topic. In this edition, we look at the needs and desires of workers across generations as well as how to make the most of everyone's favorite work event: the meeting. There are pragmatic tips and actionable advice throughout.

As always, happy reading and listening!

Be well, take good care of your families and community.
-kj

Articles 

Time: What to Know When Five Generations Share an Office. "Advice for intergenerational harmony in a changing workplace."

PwC: Strategy + Business: Younger workers want training, flexibility, and transparency. "To build a workforce for the future, leaders need to understand how priorities are changing among new generations of talent."

Harvard Business Review: 3 Types of Meetings — and How to Do Each One Well. "...Instead of focusing on when and where we meet, we ought to start with why we’re coming together and let that dictate logistics...The new work calendar isn’t about office or home, it’s about three gathering types and the conditions that serve them best."

Harvard Business Review: Make the Most of Your One-on-One Meetings. "...When the meetings are done well, they can make a team’s day-to-day activities more efficient and better, build trust and psychological safety, and improve employees’ experience, motivation, and engagement at work."

Blog Posts & Opinions

Susan Cain: The Kindred Letters: How to spend your (remaining) time. "How should you spend your remaining time on this Earth? The reality is that you don't have much time left. Maybe you have decades, maybe years, maybe weeks. Maybe you only have a few minutes. Who knows? What we do know is this: once you frame your life this way, everything changes, in potentially the best of ways..."

MentorLead: [Flash] The Could Mindset vs The Magic 8 Ball. "'…Considering what one could do shifts people from analyzing and weighing what they assume to be fixed and mutually exclusive alternatives to generating options that might reconcile underlying imperatives. Having a could mindset helps individuals engage in divergent thinking.'"

Jewish Currents: Edifice Complex. "Restoring the term 'burnout' to its roots in landlord arson puts the dispossession of poor city dwellers at its center."

Podcasts 

TED: Great leadership is a network, not a hierarchy. "What if leadership at work wasn't for a select few, but rather shared among many? Management consultant Gitte Frederiksen gives us the recipe for 'distributed leadership' -- dynamic, multidimensional networks of leaders that tap into everyone's knowledge and creativity -- and shows how it allows teams to do more and do it better."

Adam Grant: Re: Thinking. Surgeon Atul Gawande wants everyone to have a coach. "Atul Gawande was advised by a colleague to say yes to every opportunity until he turned 40. Since then he’s been a renowned surgeon, a public health leader and government policymaker, and a bestselling author and “New Yorker” writer. He talks with Adam about his fascinating career and how he balances his passions for different fields, why he works with a coach even in the operating room, and how he’s working in The White House to end our current pandemic–and prevent the next one."

TED: Is humanity smart enough to survive itself? "With quick wit and sharp insight, writer Jeanette Winterson lays out a vision of the future where human and machine intelligence meld -- forming what she calls 'alternative intelligence' -- and takes a philosophical look at our species, asking: Are we smart enough to survive how smart we are?"

Arts, Music, Culture, Literature & Humor Corner

LiveScience: Notre Dame is held together by a first-of-its-kind 'iron skeleton,' catastrophic fire revealed. "During its construction beginning in the 12th century, builders used iron staples to support Notre Dame's masonry."

The New Yorker: How Fleet Foxes Songs Shiver and Breathe. "There is always more to say about the music that means the most to us."

The Guardian: ‘He created something magical’: Calvin and Hobbes fans rejoice as creator plans first work in decades. "Bill Watterson to publish a sombre ‘fable for grown-ups’ after disappearing from public eye in 1995."

The New Yorker: Fiction. "The Face in the Mirror."

The New Yorker: Daily Shouts. "I’m Sick All Year Round, but I’m Also Ripped: Meet the Coughing Guy at Your Gym."

Reflections

“I need to listen well so that I hear what is not said.” - Thuli Madonsela

"Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time."
- Naomi Shihab Nye

The Island
by Lauren K. Watel
"I swam without ceasing around the rocks guarding the island, the looming black rocks slick with surf. In sunlight they shone like onyx, as if polished. In a storm they were flat and dull as slate. I used to search for an opening in the rocks, some small gap through which to slip my body, in the hopes of finding calmer waters, because the seas were so choppy then, the waves churning as if in anger, the foam roiling up to the rock tips, but the rocks made a wall around the island, a wall that seemed impenetrable. I swam around the rocks with my thrashing crawl—I was never a good swimmer—always wondering where my strokes would take me, the sun like a deity watching my slow progress, scratching its head and muttering, Why her, why here, swimming in circles? I could never find a space in the rocks through which the island was visible. I could only imagine a place, wild with raw beauty, running with springs and vines, where the flowers grew as high as trees, the trees high as skyscrapers, where horses galloped on the sand, horses majestic as clouds, leaving sand upturned behind them like trails of sugar, which the waves would wash over, wash away, where blue butterflies and tropical birds dotted the flowers and trees like confetti, and all the fruit I could bear to eat. What a vision, this island. I swam around it for years. If only I’d thought to swim away."