Technology won’t solve environmental issues and you know it

EDIT: I recorded a podcast version of this post (episode 63) that covered same views beyond this post: If anything marked the beginning of the industrial revolution, it was James Watt's steam engine. It wasn't the first steam engine, but was more efficient than any before. More efficient means using less energy and less pollution, right? Wrong. Each engine, yes, but more people used engines, so Watt engines used more energy and polluted more than anything. They drained mines, which helped collect more coal, which fed more engines. The direct result is today's polluted world. If you fantasize that technological…

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How to get votes for Donald Trump

Since most people I know voted for Clinton, I presume most of my readers did. Though I don't like Trump as president, as long as tens of millions of Americans voted for him, I hope my readers represent the population more faithfully than the population of lower Manhattan. Trump's win surprised most Clinton supporters. My reaching out to Trump voters and speaking with them explained a lot to me. The Trump voters I spoke to weren't the racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc people so stupid as to vote against their own interests that Clinton supporters made them out as. The tragedy…

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How you probably disrespect leaders (and yourself in the process)

  • Post category:Leadership

How to disrespect a leader: Assume he or she was born with something special and didn't have to work at it. Developing leadership skills and experience is hard and takes years, even decades, risking failure and disaster time and again. Assuming people were just born that way or have something others don't ignores all of it. I think people believe it to excuse themselves from trying.

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How you perform gets you farther than your GPA

I wrote, to follow Ryan Holiday's Here’s The Technique That Ambitious People Use To Get What They Want, I teach and coach people to get jobs through performance and it works. Schools teach people to react, take tests, and show how great they are. For a posted opening, you're presenting yourself as a commodity -- a slightly shinier one, you hope. It's based on compliance. Most analytical, geeky types got a lot of schooling. After decades of it, most people have learned that model without awareness of alternatives. If you want to avoid challenges in life and just get a…

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Martha Graham on Freedom Through Discipline and Conforming

I've quoted Martha Graham many times. At last I got the video of her saying the words. She describes how a performer achieves freedom through conforming and discipline better than anyone, in my opinion. I believe what she says holds for any active, emotional, expressive, social, performance-based field, including leadership and entrepreneurship. The dancer is realistic. His craft teaches him to be. Either the foot is pointed or it is not. No amount of dreaming will point it for you. This requires discipline, not drill, not something imposed from without, but discipline imposed by you yourself upon yourself. Your goal…

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Technology is tactical. Behavior is strategic.

People widely expect technology to solve our environmental problems. What technology? They don't know. Something someone will invent in the future. What about the pattern that technology has driven consumption of fossil fuels and plastic, accelerated using up resources, and created pollution such as plastic, carcinogens, and so on? But but but they make things more efficient. They do for a while, but the trend is toward accelerating the system creating the problems. You know the problems—sea levels, resource depletion, extinctions. Technology, especially speculative, unknown, future technology can be part of a solution. But technology itself at most suggests tactical…

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041: David Burkus, Conversation 1: Flipping the mental model

David has helped me many times. I felt honored to host him and, I hope, help start his environmental legacy. We covered two main things. First, his new book, Friend of a Friend, on networking. His background as a professor and practitioner means he approaches networking systematically and practically, so beyond learning to network more effectively, you understand networking as a process. Second, his environmental commitment. I loved his choice for reasons you'll hear when you listen. I believe it will improve his life beyond just living by his environmental values. David is direct, knowledgeable, experienced, and plain-spoken. Enjoy!

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Leading Through Emotions Is the Opposite of Manipulation

Leading Through Emotions Is the Opposite of Manipulation Leading means helping people do what they want, not what they don't want. Thinking otherwise undermines your ability to lead. As a leadership professor, trainer, and author, I have occasion to see people develop leadership skills at all levels. When I describe the difference between leadership and management, they tend to accept that management generally involves behavior and things you can see and measure. Its goal is compliance. Leadership, by contrast, more involves emotions and motivations--things you can't see or measure. Its goal is more about getting people to want to do…

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You’d Fire an Employee Whose Goal was Awareness. Why Accept it for the Environment?

You'd Fire an Employee Whose Goal was Awareness. Why Accept it for the Environment? If you don't act on your values, are you able to lead? What can you learn? Ridiculous in business Imagine you needed surgery and asked the surgeon who was going to operate on you, "Have you ever done this surgery before?" and he or she said, I haven't done it before, by I'm aware of the procedure. Imagine you were going to hire a new COO, asked his or her operational experience, and he or she said, I haven't worked in operations, but my awareness is high. Would you hire a plumber who…

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Empathy, compassion, Sam Harris, a former neo-nazi, and leadership

People seem unable to understand groups they disagree with these days. If you disagree with someone enough to argue with them, you probably want to influence them to stop acting in ways you disagree with---that is, you want to lead them. To lead someone you don't have authority over, you have to understand them and, ideally, make them feel understood. If you behave and communicate in ways that people feel misunderstood, you can say goodbye to influencing them because you led them to keep their defenses up. What works against you To pick one dimension of polarization, in politics, Hilary…

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Looking to scientists and engineers for leadership distracts from getting things done

"We're doomed': Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention" threatens the headline of an article about a social scientist. There are plenty of similar articles about plenty of similar people. The article recounts Hillman predicting many problems and suggesting solutions, but not getting them implemented. If we want to solve environmental problems we have to separate science and engineering from leadership. Scientists' and engineers' training and skills make them effective at collecting data, analyzing it, and making predictions. You'll find no greater supporter of science and engineering than me. They rarely have training to influence…

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Cold showers aren’t hard showers. They’re easy workouts.

Cold Showers Aren't Hard Showers. They're Easy Workouts. Confusion about their purpose scare people from realizing their value as one of the easiest, cheapest, and effective improvement practices. I've written here many times on the benefits of cold showers. I've blogged more about them. You wouldn't have clicked on the headline if you weren't curious about them or already doing them. Inc. is a community of achievers and has covered cold showers many times. Many talk about science behind their benefit, but since double-blind controlled experiments are hard--how do you create a plausible placebo?--I find credence in their effect I…

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The Growth to Freedom podcast: “Discover Leadership That Works”

Dan Kuschell and I met last year and became friends over our similar passions for leadership---servant leadership in particular. Read his bio and watch his videos below to see his story. Scheduling appearing on his podcast took forever, but it finally happened. Today I bring you our conversation on his show, Growth to Freedom. Knowing someone so long makes the conversation more friendly, open, and vulnerable. We approached common issues from new perspectives. I liked that. Listen to the conversation. Here are the show notes: Discover Leadership that Works, Lessons Learned from Failure, and the Necessity of Listening with Joshua…

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In “Leadership and the Environment,” which matters more: leadership or environment?

  • Post category:Leadership

A friend sent a link to an article about how we can save the environment. People consistently suggest potential guests for my podcast who do environmental things. I'm glad that they're thinking about the environment. but they don't get what I'm doing. There are already plenty of people working on spreading environmental facts, knowledge, tips, analysis, and telling people what to do. It got us far, but I think they're missing what will get people acting, which is leadership---creating meaning, purpose, joy, and other rewarding emotions, plus teamwork, community, and so on. People hear "Leadership and the Environment," fix on…

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Op-ed Fridays: which is easier, freeing slaves or not using disposable cups and bottles?

This morning's New York Times posted a story, Holocaust Is Fading From Memory, Survey Finds, reporting a survey with results such as Thirty-one percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust; the actual number is around six million. Forty-one percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot say what Auschwitz was. My last name, Spodek, is Jewish-Polish, though my father clarified that though our ancestors came from within Polish boundaries, they weren't considered Polish because they were Jewish. His parents and grandparents came to the United States…

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RJ’s TEDx talk that began as homework from my course

RJ Khalaf took my course at NYU, Fundamentals of Social Entrepreneurship, a few years ago. His class project evolved into LEAD Palestine, which led the Dalai Lama to name him a Dalai Lama fellow. He also appeared on the Leadership and the Environment podcast and was a panelist on our expert panel last week. Saturday he gave his first TEDx talk at TEDx NYU. All credit goes to him for his accomplishments, but I felt great pride seeing something that emerged from my course reach international acclaim and to see his skill in representing the project. https://youtu.be/Ig1W6M_-ka8 The beginning This…

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Leonard Kim’s Grow Your Influence Tree on Voice of America: “How to Lead People Without Relying on Authority”

I've wanted to meet top influencer Leonard Kim for years, having seen his online presence everywhere. I appeared on his Voice of America show today, speaking on leading people without relying on authority. He led the interview to get to the heart of my practice. I enjoyed the conversation and got to share what counts. Listen to the conversation. Listen to the conversation.

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Success! A first Expert Panel from the Leadership and the Environment podcast

Yesterday was the Leadership and the Environment podcast's first Expert Panel, on a path to turn the podcast into a movement of people enjoying acting on their environmental values. Expert panelists Vincent Stanley, Robin Nagle, and RJ Khalaf topped the reasons making yesterday so successful. They openly shared their struggles and triumphs in vivid, colorful stories. Each time I looked at the audience, everyone seemed engaged and enraptured. We started early at 6pm. By the intended end of the panel at 7:30pm, a sizable number of attendees seemed as engaged as ever. Many stayed until at least 8:30pm with many…

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A Lesson in Authentic Leadership With Super Bowl Champion Bryan Braman

A Lesson in Authentic Leadership With Super Bowl Champion Bryan Braman Think NFL players only care about the game? This Philadelphia Eagle showed the leadership skills that make champions, on the field and in life. When a friend offered to connect me to Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagle Bryan Braman, my first thought--as a native Philadelphian raised on cheese steaks and soft pretzels--was of course I want to talk to a guy who brought the Vince Lombardi trophy home! My next thought was: "My column and podcast are on leadership. If he's a 'bad boy' player out for fun for himself, the conversation won't go well." Mea culpa at…

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038: RJ Khalaf, conversation 2: Making productive leaders from hopeless martyrs

RJ and I talk about the early success of LEAD Palestine, the organization he began to teach leadership to youths that most of the world abandoned in Palestine. Where their environment made it natural to respond with hopelessness and what comes from it---desperation to the point of aspiring to blow oneself up---RJ is bringing social and emotional development to create hope themselves. They happen to have been born into a world where leadership meant in politics authoritarianism and militarism, which bled into personal relationships. Nobody taught alternatives and those who acted on those models succeeded, however much at others' costs.…

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Our first Leadership and the Environment Panel of Experts: April 3 at NYU

EDIT: We recorded the panel, which you can listen to: Here's the original announcement: Do you care about the environment? Do you care about leading? The Leadership and the Environment podcast NYU's School of Liberal Studies invite you to improve both at a Panel of Leadership and Environment Experts Tuesday, April 3, 6pm – 8pm NYU Silver Building, 100 Washington Sq E (at Washington Sq N), room 405 Free, register here Featuring  Vincent Stanley Vincent, co-author with Yvon Chouinard of The Responsible Company, has been with Patagonia since its beginning in 1973, including executive roles as head of sales or…

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TOMORROW: My webinar with LEADx, “Lead without authority”

TOMORROW NOON eastern (9am pacific) see me live on the LEADx webinar, "Lead without authority." LEADx told me that over 100 people have registered so far. It's free, but you have to register. LEADx is important. They created Inc.'s annual influential list of 100 top public speakers (16 of whom have been on my podcast or I've been on theirs). We'll cover a set of skills that will get you far in life, and whose lack can lead to stagnation. You'll learn How to lead people you don't have authority over, such as your boss, clients, the CEO, family, friends…

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Chasing Coral and Personal Responsibility

Chasing Coral and Personal Responsibility A brilliant, important documentary on the environment viewed from a leadership and the environment perspective. The documentary Chasing Coral is emotionally evocative and hauntingly, tragically beautiful. I can see why it got its stellar reviews. I recommend it. While I support their goals, I hope it's the last "Do as I say, not as I do" documentary. They undermine efforts to change people's behavior to pollute less. Here's the trailer: Leadership and the Environment From a leadership perspective, it didn't motivate action. It raised awareness, but the environment, coral included, doesn't react to awareness. It reacts to behavior. A touching scene occurs…

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Roger Bannister, the 4-Minute Mile, and Leadership

Roger Bannister, the 4-Minute Mile, and Leadership We who strive for more can learn from the great athlete, no matter our field. The greatest lesson we can learn from the achievement of Roger Bannister, who broke the 4-minute mile in 1954 and who died at 88 yesterday, arises from someone else breaking his record only seven weeks later. And then many times since. Why? Because as great as his physical feat, it shows that his mental feat was as great. Seven weeks isn't enough time for others to change training, strategy, diet, and so on. They already had the physical ability to break four minutes. Once he showed…

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The Future of Environmental Leadership

The Future of Environmental Leadership Want to lead? The opportunities to lead in the environment may be the best around. Hosting the Leadership and the Environment podcast has led to a lot of conversations on leadership and the environment. As an entrepreneur and adjunct professor of leadership, I talk to many who want to become leaders. Many shun working on the environment because they think it will distract from their career and leadership ambitions. They excuse themselves from acting on the environment with the complaint But acting on the environment will distract me from getting ahead. Are they crazy? There is national and global demand for…

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