Sometimes if you don’t learn from history, you are doomed to LOSE THE OPPORTUNITY to repeat it;) The most interesting ideas often come from unexpected places (and times:) Around 2000 years ago, the Romans started adding a certain kind of volcanic ash that made concrete self-repairing. The ash contained calcium that would naturally fill gaps […]

Japanese cultural forms such as literature, manga and anime explore many social aspects of individual existence in a way that resonates for people around the world. What does it mean to be a socially-integrated individual? Technology has enabled the emergence of a world that seems in many ways to be much more inter-connected than anything […]

Never give up on that dream! I recently watched a program following the endeavors of a young woman who runs an onigiri shop staffed by aspiring “idols.” She also sponsors some of these young women in their efforts to make it in the idol industry. She describes her venture as 「大人の青春」(otona no seishun / a […]

Which reflects a higher level of psychological security and emotional maturity?「嫌われる勇気」(the courage to be disliked by others) or「好かれる勇気」(the courage to be liked by ourselves)? As we move through the stages of life, most of us do at some point have to develop the the courage to do and be things that expose us to the […]

In this 1983 article, Indrei Ratiu describes how the “most international” managers consider both cultural and individual factors when interpreting their international colleagues’ behavior. When working internationally, it is a good idea to study cultural patterns, but it is often even more important to pay close attention to the person in front of you right […]

Wouldn’t it be nice to have one framework to organize all that feedback, reflection, ideation, coaching, planning (i.e. thinking and communicating about the past and future) that make you an effective leader? As action-oriented beings, when we think about the past, we usually do so with the purpose of influencing something in the future. Whatever […]

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explained that we all pretty much live in bubbles of our own making. We each have a limited view of the world AND we for the most part assume that other people see the same things in the world that we do. He called this phenomenon WISIATI: “What […]

Back when I was a graduate student, I used Kuhnert and Lewis’s transformational / transactional leadership model together with French and Raven’s five bases of social power (rewards, coercion, expertise, legitimacy and referent – the power of “like”) in my research exploring how the Hojo family wrested political power from the courtiers in Kyoto to […]

Ideas evolve in cycles as we notice sources of dissonance, articulate opportunities, experiment with strategies, learn and change, become comfortable, then notice new sources of dissonance. Idea cycles also evolve in cycles. The ideapractice cycle has evolved into EDIT:) EDIT: A formula you can use to convert change (変化) into transformation (変革) by writing stories […]

Many (if not most) of our communication, relationship, influence and collaboration challenges emerge through errors of omission rather than errors of commission. Back around 2007, when I created this graphic for a program on interpersonal influence that I developed for the Japanese subsidiary of a global investment bank, social neuroscience had not yet become that […]