“A ‘motivation day’ organized by an Italian real estate agency ended in agony when nine staff were hospitalized after walking barefoot on a bed of hot coals. Motivational trainer Alessandro Di Priamo said the hotel the exercise was held in gave him the wrong kind of wood.” (As found in Canadian Business Magazine, September 13, 2010).
As one who does professional development for a living, this story caught my eye. I am always looking for new and creative ways to help organizations do training and build capacity, but I can honestly say I have never thought of using fire walking as a method.
Recently I did a luncheon presentation for the Petroleum Joint Venture Association entitled, “All I Need To Know About Professional Ethics I Learned In Kindergarten…Sort Of”. I used Robert Fulghum’s book “All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten” to illustrate that much of how we live was learned early in life. Those basic lessons many of us discovered in the sandbox serve as a foundation for what we still do, even in our professional lives.
If you are curious, here is Fulghum’s list:
Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup. The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
And then remember the Dick and Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.
There are many comments that could be made about this list, but the point I want to emphasize is this; there is a place, and a need, to understand the new context, the new issues, the new situations we experience in modern organizational and business life. And, we may need to consider creative ways of addressing those issues (fire-walking seems a bit extreme to me, but maybe it has potential). But the place to begin, I believe, is by recognizing that the fundamentals that give us our best chance of success have been with us for a long time and we know what they are. The key seems to be finding a way of remembering those lessons and then seeking ways to apply those lessons to the new situations and issues we encounter. Great organizations hold fast to the basics while finding appropriate and creative ways of speaking to the new.
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on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Comments.
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Career-Limiting Moves
As one who does professional development for a living, this story caught my eye. I am always looking for new and creative ways to help organizations do training and build capacity, but I can honestly say I have never thought of using fire walking as a method.
Recently I did a luncheon presentation for the Petroleum Joint Venture Association entitled, “All I Need To Know About Professional Ethics I Learned In Kindergarten…Sort Of”. I used Robert Fulghum’s book “All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten” to illustrate that much of how we live was learned early in life. Those basic lessons many of us discovered in the sandbox serve as a foundation for what we still do, even in our professional lives.
If you are curious, here is Fulghum’s list:
Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup. The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
And then remember the Dick and Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.
There are many comments that could be made about this list, but the point I want to emphasize is this; there is a place, and a need, to understand the new context, the new issues, the new situations we experience in modern organizational and business life. And, we may need to consider creative ways of addressing those issues (fire-walking seems a bit extreme to me, but maybe it has potential). But the place to begin, I believe, is by recognizing that the fundamentals that give us our best chance of success have been with us for a long time and we know what they are. The key seems to be finding a way of remembering those lessons and then seeking ways to apply those lessons to the new situations and issues we encounter. Great organizations hold fast to the basics while finding appropriate and creative ways of speaking to the new.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.