Quote of the Week: on Politics
“…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
FDA starting to hold big companies accountable
The FDA has issued a warning letter to food companies about the importance of accurate nutrition labeling and reprimanded their false or misleading claims.
Hope for the center?
I’ve shared before how technology, media and politics can be (and often are) hijacked by the passionate extremes. In a recent article, Tyler Cowen argues that the “median voter theorem” posits that politicians can’t ultimately stray too far from the mainstream where citizens live.
Volcker’s Prescription
We’d do well to listen to former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker on the structural reforms the U.S. economy and financial sector need. I only hope politicians will rise above special interests and do what the nation needs to build a solid future.
First Lady To Fight Childhood Obesity Epidemic
Michelle Obama is poised to highlight the need for society to tackle and overcome the childhood obesity epidemic. Many forces are arrayed at her, including socio-cultural, as well as economic. She will need all the help she can get.
The following article lists a lot of ideas for how to fight childhood obesity. But one of the most effective ways is for responsible food companies to craft and market truly healthful products that taste good and are good for you, and that are attractive to kids. It is not easy. But it can be done.
Conflicts Do End
To those who wonder if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will ever end and who think it is truly “intractable”, I thought I’d share a note from my colleague John Lyndon, Executive Director of OneVoice Europe:
I know that this is off-topic, but just thought I’d draw people’s attention to a not-entirely-unrelated news story: The ‘final piece in the jigsaw’ was put into place in Belfast, Ireland last night, with the finalising of twenty year long process of negotiations, for a seven hundred year long conflict. The DUP and Sinn Féin (the two most extremist political parties in modern Irish history) have agreed the last details of a power sharing agreement.
Strong, patriotic and at one time violent leaders of both communities sat down and thrashed out a deal that looks like putting to bed most of the grievances that resulted in decades of violence and thousands of deaths. Conflicts do end, the wishes of the moderate majority bear fruit, and extremists eventually come into the political mainstream.
Quote of the Week: Aim High
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)
Syria’s Mufti Affirms Shared Humanity of Jews, Christians and Muslims
In a remarkable sermon, Syria’s highest Sunni religious authority spoke courageously and powerfully about religions requiring humanity and respect, including these statements:
“If the Prophet Mohammed had asked me to deem Christians or Jews heretics, I would have deemed Mohammed himself a heretic."
Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun also “said Islam was a religion of peace, adding: ‘If Mohammed had commanded us to kill people, I would have told him he was not a prophet.’”
Quote of the Week: Imagine and Execute
If you can imagine it, you can create it.
If you can dream it, you can become it.
–William Arthur Ward
Quote of the Week: Adaptive Leadership
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.
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