The Intelligent Questioner
See also Courageous Followership Blog


Courage

In a world where the sand is continuously shifting underfoot, courage is a lifeboat. Yes, we need lifeboats even on land in these times of rapid transition, uncertainty, and abuse of power. Sharna Fabiano, Life Coach, Followership trainer and Tango teacher extraordinaire has written on How To Be Brave in […]


Train the Trainer, Brussels 2017

For the following two days I worked in Brussels with a dozen wonderful professionals in the training and executive coaching field. Most were from Europe though one came from Australia and another from Indonesia. The purpose was to equip them to fulfill any demand stimulated by my presentations for the […]


European Union, 2017

For those familiar with the many quirks of the US form of government, let me assure you that it looks almost rational next to the complexity of the EU institutions designed to achieve commonalities among its 28 widely varying member nations. I presented two workshops on Courageous Followership at the […]


Intelligent Disobedience in Chinese

I am thrilled to announce that my book Intelligent Disobedience has been published in Beijing in Chinese as of August 1st of this year. We had anticipated seeing it in bookstores in China sooner but the government needed to allay its concerns over terms such as “authority” and “disobedience”. Without […]


Partners in Courage

I had the great pleasure of visiting my colleague Bill Treasurer at his home in North Carolina this past week, on my way back from viewing the awesome total eclipse from high up in the gorgeous Smoky Mountains. Bill and I are comrades-in-arms. He published his first book Right Risk […]


NASA and Intelligent Disobedience

NASA’s Joint Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is managed by Cal Tech University. It is responsible for the non-human (robotic) space flights in our solar system and for advancing the earth sciences. It is an extraordinary collection of highly educated, motivated and diverse professionals. I was invited to conduct workshops […]


Book Excerpt – Wise Leaders Value Intelligent Disobedience

Intelligent Disobedience does not imply that the authority figure is acting immorally, though that case certainly occurs. The individual with formal authority may simply be wrong for a variety of reasons. There are many other well- intentioned reasons that a person with authority may ask us to do something that […]


Book Excerpt – What is Intelligent Disobedience?

What exactly is Intelligent Disobedience? I had the same question when I first heard the term. These are two words that don’t usually fit together. We know what obedience is: following orders or rules or established ways of doing things. Obeying usually keeps life running smoothly. Disobedience is a contrary […]


If I Had Known Then what I Know Now

US 1936 Olympics gold medal backstroke champion, Adolph Kiefer, the son of German immigrants, died this week at 98 years old. As the US Navy’s chief swim instructor in WWII he is credited with saving thousands of lives by teaching sailors a survival form of the backstroke. He broke world […]


Tortured Souls

In the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Army Major General (Retired) Antonio Taguba and Marine Lt Colonel (Retired) Scott Cooper review two memoirs about torture that the authors of the memoirs participated in while assigned to the Mid-East in the “war on terror.” These memoirs are relevant reads for […]