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I just finished Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt’s fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable The Swerve [1]. Professor Greenblatt guides us through the wanderings of the main character, book hunter Poggio Barcciolini, who finds the lost manuscript of  Lucretius’ poem “On the Nature of the Universe” that was to influence the start of the Renaissance and scientific and humanistic thought for centuries thereafter. The book’s key underlying theme, the unexpected collisions of tiny particles as a foundation for the universe, leads this blog to ask how events and people engaged in business, the non-profit sector, or academia (organizational atoms) handle unexpected collisions. In...

I recently reread renowned Stanford University Professor Philip Zimabardo’s brilliant essay “The Psychology of Power”. [1] Using examples from Abu Ghraib to his own famous prison experiments, Professor Zimbardo reminds us that we “are all subject to…underemphasizing situational explanations” while overemphasizing “individual orientations”.[2] (more…)

Last Wednesday, June 21, I had the great privilege of a reserved seat at the Dalai Lama’s lecture at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I earlier had the great privilege of earning my PhD in Social Policy. His holiness demonstrated his usual indescribable way of expressing the most complex human challenges in a single word or phrase. The one I choose for this blog is: “oneness”. (more…)

Introductory phrases such as “in our case….” or “given our board’s history…” or “in light of the expertise and dedication on our board…or “the culture of our organization prevents….” increasingly invade discussions of governance, accountability, transparency, and ethics (what I call “GATE”). For example, some boards consider that because they rarely have conflicts of interest, a meticulous conflicts procedure may not be necessary. Others believe that the board Chair is so competent that he or she should have a more extensive role in governance decisions (committee structure and assignments, succession planning, CEO evaluation and remuneration analysis….) than GATE suggests –...

The recent resignation of the CEO of Yahoo! over a misstatement of his University degrees raises one deceptively simple reminder: the most obvious still needs to be verified. The message for boards is that outside service providers (in this case, human resources verification firms or search firms) need to detail their methodology and the specifics of the application, not simply a conclusion. It wasn’t enough for the outside verification firm (which as I understand it from the financial press was not the search firm in this case) to confirm that the cv was checked. (more…)