Daniel Lubetzky

…Republicans lead in the wrong direction and Democrats are unable to lead in any direction at all.
- Lincoln Chafee, “Goodbye to All That,” NYTimes, February 20, 2010

It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to be kind to others..

-Anonymous

From a conversation I had last spring with Scott Weber, who heads Interpeace.org:

“The calm following certain decisive war victories is dangerous as it masks the factors that can fuel future violent conflict and civil war in the future.”

Scott M. Weber, Director-General, Interpeace

On the other side, I have also heard people argue, persuasively if not popularly, the following viewpoint:

There is some irony in recognizing that, while negotiations bring a just process that can be better defended and that people can buy into, in general, after a "decisive victory" of one side, peace is more sustainable than in a "negotiated peace", which may be harder to sustain…

Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.

-Harriet Green
CEO, Premier Farnell (and member of the OneVoice/PeaceWorks Foundation Board of Directors)

If you can imagine it, you can create it.

If you can dream it, you can become it.

–William Arthur Ward

Poem forwarded by my cousin Sergio.  Apologies to non-Spanish speakers…

Final del año

Ni el pormenor simbólico

de reemplazar un nueve por un diez

ni esa metáfora baldía

que convoca a un lapso que muere

ni el cumplimiento de un proceso astronómico

aturden y socavan

la altiplanicie de esta noche

y nos obligan a esperar

las doce irreparables campanadas.

La causa verdadera

es la sospecha general y borrosa

del enigma del tiempo;

es el asombro ante el milagro

de que a despecho de infinitos azares,

de que a despecho de que somos

las gotas del rio de Heráclito,

perdure algo en nosotros:

inmóvil.

     – Jorge Luis Borges

Leadership is the process of bringing a new and generally unwelcome reality to an individual, organization or setting, and helping them successfully adapt to it.

-Rony Heifetz (as quoted in a Harvard Kennedy School study (by Dutch Leonard) on Leadership in High Uncertainty Environments, as part of Young Global Leaders executive program.

Other interesting insights from that course with important applications for movements like OneVoice as well as to fast-growing companies like KIND:

• On the danger (and opportunity) of Vantage Bias:

     When you are holding a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

Cognitive Biases to watch against: giving too much weight to personal experience/illusion of experience; overconfidence of influence/power, or ability to predict future, and of ability to control future; ignoring disconfirming evidence; inability to perceive radical change; escalation of commitment in the face of "evidence"; tendency to turn issues into personal convictions;

• Affirm Values at Difficult Moments
• Never let bad news be a surprise; prepare people to enable them to adapt
• Eye contact in some African countries is disrespectful.
• Build deep team cohesion during times of stability to enable you to deal with uncertainty in the future
• To manage well in a crisis, prepare AHEAD by thinking of, and hiring, the right people with the right values – resilience, team spirit, loyalty, courage
• Create structured discipline in the mundane, so the unanticipated is compensated by expectable outcomes
• Grounded Confidence is important; false optimism is not sustainable;
• Learning most effective when: Positive, Immediate, Certain, and Reinforced.
• Ensure issue (rather than person putting it forward) is what is evaluated and ranked.
• Listen to warning systems – forms of dissent, dissonance; encourage feedback;
• Don’t dismiss disconfirming evidence; question if you are not too narrowly focused – lighthouse/boat scenario; must remain open to possibility that you are wrong;
• A leader can change the conditions in which the team operates, out of which new models for leadership will emerge.
• Ecologist: when you reach in and try to take out anything out of the universe, you find out that it is interconnected to everything else.

My father taught me a very important lesson when I was a girl growing up in East Germany. He said, “Always be more than you appear and never appear to be more than you are.”

-as told to Bono (U2) and captured by him in a New York Times opinion piece.

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These are my favorite responses to Michael Pollan’s NYTimes blog request for readers’ rules about eating:

• From my Romanian grandmother: “Breakfast, you should eat alone. Lunch, you should share with a friend. Dinner, give to your enemy.”
  - Irina A. Dumitrescu
• “Never eat something that’s pretending to be something else…no textured vegetable protein or veggie burgers (fake meat), no artificial sweeteners, no margarine (fake butter), no ‘low fat’ sour cream, no turkey bacon, no ‘chocolate flavor sauce’ tat doesn’t contain chocolate…If I want something that tastes like meat or butter, I would rather have the real thing than some chemical concoction pretending to be more healthful.” - Sonya Legg
• “Eat foods in inverse proportion to how much its lobby spends to push it.” – Kirk Westphal
• “One of my top rules for eating comes from economics. The law of diminishing marginal utility reminds me that each additional bite is generally less satisfying than the previous bite. This helps me slow down, savor the first bites,stop eating sooner. It also helps get plenty of variety in my diet because this rule also makes a meal of small plates more enticing: 3 bites of 5 plates versus 15 bites of 1 will maximize satisfaction and nutritional variety.” – Laura Kelley
• “When drinking tea, just drink tea.”  I find this Zen teaching useful, given my inclination toward information absorption in the morning, when I’m also trying to eat breakfast, get the dog out, start the fire and organize my day.  I believe that it’s so much better for our bodies when we are present to our food.  Perhaps a bit of mindfulness goes a long way first thing in the morning.  (Of course, some time ago, I came across a humorous anecdote about a hapless Zen student whose teacher taught him this aphorism and then was discovered by the same student, drinking tea and reading the paper.  When confronted, the teacher said, “When drinking tea and reading the paper, just drink tea and read the paper!”) – Michelle Poirot

I really liked this thought by Jonathan Safran Foer on his goal as a parent. He wrote it in the context of his journey as a vegetarian, but it has wider applications and resonates as a noble aim:

I’m not as worried about what [my children] will choose as much as my ability to make them conscious of the choices before them. I won’t measure my success as a parent by whether my children share my values, but by whether they act according to their own.

– Jonathan Safran Foer, in The Fruits of Family Trees, New York Times Magazine

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