Creating a military that is audacious
I am reflagging this article as it continues to be one of the strongest statements of the appropriate use of Intelligent Disobedience in the military.
The Intelligent Questioner
See also Courageous Followership Blog
The Intelligent Questioner
See also Courageous Followership Blog
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 […]
Why did Border Patrol Agents obey bad orders?
Several thousand children, many of them infants and toddlers, were forcibly separated from their parents and sent, frightened and alone, to different parts of the country. Were the Border Patrol Agents who took these children from their parents unfeeling monsters? In short, no. Then how did they do this monstrous […]
ICE Agents must intelligently disobey inhumane orders
A trick question is sometimes asked by the prominent leadership scholar, Barbara Kellerman, from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “How many people did Hitler kill?” The correct answer, which almost no one gives, is “none”. The killings were all done by the followers of the Fuhrer (which means […]
Follower Power – Ununderstood, Unappreciated, and Underestimated
My colleague, Barbara Kellerman, of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has been a champion of Followership for years. She has used my book in her courses and has written her own book titled “Followership”, as well as more recent work on Leadership that always includes Followership as an […]
VW Fraud: Manager Was Just Following Orders
A year after the exposure of the massive fraud VW perpetrated on American consumers, knowingly deceiving emission control tests while exceeding emission limits by as much as 40 times, the evidence is at hand of the real culprit in the crime – a culture that rewards “just following orders”. The […]
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 […]
International Leadership Association (ILA) Board Meeting, Brussels, 2017
From Cambridge I and my fellow International Leadership Association (ILA) board members from the ILA took the “chunnel” train to Brussels, one of the centers of the European Union. We held our board meeting that evening at Deloitte University. For the following three and a half days I participated in […]
Cambridge University, 2017
On October 2017 I participated in a panel on leaders, followers and populism, which became an energetic dialogue. It was held at the Moller Centre, Churchill College and organized by the James McGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, University of Cambridge. Georgia Sorenson who chairs the Academy, has invited me to […]
Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst
The Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst holds as much prestige in England as West Point does in the US. It was a great honor to be the first in their speaker series at the newly established Centre for Army Leadership. I was told to expect about 80 people. 600 enlisted […]
Organizational blind spots: Dove soap campaign
The recent hugely insensitive advertisement by Unilever for their Dove soap is a textbook example of organizational blind spots. This is a painful example of why the voices of minorities and staff at all levels of the organization must be invited, included, raised up and empowered to influence decision making. […]
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 […]
MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award 2017
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab announced today the winner of its Disobedience Award. They are Dr, Mona Hanna-Attisha and Professor Marc Edwards whose work unearthed and publicized the lead poisoning occurring in Flint Michigan as a result of politically driven changes to the source of the city’s drinking […]
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 […]
