Keynotes
Peter Senge, Institutional
Courage Starts with You
Monday morning, 8:30–10:00 AM
As the world’s foremost proponent of organizational learning over the last 25 years, Peter Senge knows a thing or two about courage. In his latest book, The Necessary Revolution, he and his coauthors profile several individuals who are working within the organizational context to bring about profound change in the way the world does business. These “open-minded pragmatists,” as he describes them, are “people who care deeply about the future but who are suspicious of quick fixes, emotional nostrums, and superficial answers to complex problems. They have a hard-earned sense of how their organizations work, tempered by humility concerning what any one person can do alone. They often do not think of themselves as leaders, but time proves them wrong.” What they share—and what Peter will help us define for ourselves—is the courage to persist in the sometimes terrifying process of letting go of Industrial Age assumptions to start shaping the new story that’s waiting to be created.
Peter
Senge is an acclaimed author and founding chair of the Society
for Organizational Learning. His landmark book, The Fifth Discipline:
The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, has sold more
than a million copies, and in 1997, Harvard Business Review identified
it as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years. Peter
is also the co-author of Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change
in People, Organizations, and Society and The Necessary Revolution:
How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable
World. | Back to top...
David Whyte, The
Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self, and Relationship
Monday afternoon, 4:15–5:45 PM
Most of us must sustain three marriages in our lives: the marriage with our work and society, the marriage—official or not—with our partner, and the deeper marriage with our emerging selves. To choose between these relationships is to impoverish them all. David Whyte talks about the need to move beyond current ideas of work-life balance and instead create a conversation, a live frontier between all three commitments that enriches each area of our lives, allowing it to be simultaneously troubled and emboldened by the others. Drawing from his own life as well as the lives of some of the world’s great writers and activists, David finds that only by understanding the simultaneously robust and delicate nature of the three marriages and the stages of their maturation can we create a real portrait of our lives and our place in the world. Join us for a poetic and compelling investigation of these important commitments of a human life.
David
Whyte is the author of six books of poetry and two best-selling
prose books, including the recently published The Three Marriages:
Reimagining Work, Self, and Relationship. An Associate Fellow at
Templeton College and Said Business School at the University of
Oxford, he is one of the few poets to take his perspectives on creativity
into the field of organizational development, where he works with many
European, American, and international companies. David holds a degree
in marine zoology. | Back to top...
Linda Booth Sweeney, Systems
Intelligence: Remembering What We Already Know
Tuesday morning, 8:30–10:00 AM
If you listen carefully to the news these days, you’ll hear references to big interconnected problems—escalating food prices, lack of clean fuels, declining economies, and global warming—as “systems.” Yet where in our schooling were we taught to take a systems approach? Without systems skills, we’re more likely to remain stuck on the problem-solving treadmill, where our “solutions” often only create more problems or make the original problem worse. The good news is that we all have an innate “intelligence” about systems. Part of our challenge is remembering what we already know. In this interactive session, we’ll look at several key shifts in perspective that can help us to stop operating from crisis to crisis and begin to think and act in a more integrated, more effective way.
Linda
Booth Sweeney is a researcher, consultant, and systems educator.
She was a research associate for M.I.T.’s Organizational Learning Center
(now SoL) and is now a founding partner in the SoL Education Partnership,
as well as a content expert for SEED—Schlumberger Excellence in Educational
Development. Linda is the author of several books and numerous articles,
including her most recent book, Connected Wisdom: Living Stories
about Living Systems. She received her doctorate from Harvard University
in 2004. | Back to top...
Juana Bordas, Salsa,
Soul, and Spirit: Leadership for our Multicultural Future
Tuesday afternoon, 4:15–5:45 PM
The emergence of a global culture that contains the jewels of many traditions will be a defining characteristic of the 21st century. Successful leaders will be those who develop the ability to create inclusive, collective, and people-centered environments by tapping into the assets of many traditions. This transformation requires an understanding of our interconnectedness—one based on the American Indian belief that “We are all related.” In this lively session, Juana Bordas invites participants to embrace new ways of thinking and leading that will enhance their effectiveness in this increasingly diverse world. She identifies eight core leadership principles common to Latino, African-American, and American Indian cultures and demonstrates how incorporating these principles into mainstream organizations will strengthen leadership practice and inspire today’s ethnically rich workforce.
Juana
Bordas is president of Mestiza Leadership International
and author of Salsa, Soul, and Spirit: Leadership for a Multicultural
Age. She is vice president of the board of the Greenleaf Center for
Servant Leadership and a former faculty member for the Center for
Creative Leadership. Juana is a founder/former executive director
of Mi Casa Women’s Center and founding president/CEO of the National Hispana
Leadership Institute. She recently served as advisor to the Harvard
Journal of Hispanic Policy and
the Kellogg National Fellows Program. | Back to top...
John Seely Brown, Rethinking
the Organization: From Scalable Efficiency to Scalable Learning
Wednesday morning, 11:00 AM–12:30 PM
Our 20th-century models of the organization were based on predictability and scalable efficiency, with the goal of minimizing transaction costs. But now we need new models of the organization and the workscape, models that embrace the unpredictability and constant disruptive change of the 21st century without just telling employees that they must be retrained every five years or so. In this provocative presentation, John Seely Brown will discuss new models built around productive friction, accelerated learning, and ways to get better faster by working with others. Pulling unusual examples from extreme sports—big-wave surfing and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (such as World of Warcraft)—as well as from Asia, he will look at ways to build trust across ecosystems. Finally, John will address the emergence of Web 2.0 tools for expediting collective intelligence in the organization and across networks of practice.
John
Seely Brown is former chief scientist of Xerox and former director
of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In these roles, he has been
responsible for guiding one of the most famous technology think tanks
in the world and leading one of the most celebrated and far-ranging corporate
research efforts. John is now the co-chairman of Deloitte’s new Center
for Edge Innovation and visiting scholar and advisor to the provost of
USC. He co-writes a blog at Harvard Business Review called “The
Big Shift” that constructs a conversation around the topics in this keynote. | Back to top...