Dr Laura James's writings

  Marianne Bellotti on two different attitudes to fear, and how they affect leadership styles and careers .  People tend to think that the biggest deciding factor in their career is their talent or skill, but I don’t believe that. The way you process risk and handle fear has more impact on what kind of career you have than any other single factor. ... Leaders as they develop tend to break in one of two directions on risk. There are the leaders that — like samurai — embrace death. They see their role as protecting and empowering the people below them who do the real work and it’s an honor to serve the team’s interests even if things do not go well for them personally. In the best organizations the leader’s manager also does not fear death and they have the same safety as they grant to their people. But some people don’t process risk in that way. Those leaders get drawn into trying to outrun death, which is as impossible metaphorically as it would be literally. You can’t avoid t...

I'm very excited about our upcoming maintenance event. Join us on Thursday: https://ti.to/festival-of-maintenance/social-care-2020   https://twitter.com/MaintenanceFest/status/1287767194806493185 I hope we can build on the issues noted by Diane Coyle in this week's Talking Politics podcast about work, who does it and how it is paid for. Brian Merchant interviews novelist Tim Maughan , who says: I actually originally got the idea, and you’ll probably remember this — it was in the Bay Area, it was in San Francisco, maybe like 2013, 2014. There was a story about a bunch of guys, Latino guys in the neighborhood, who every Sunday would get together and play five-five soccer on these five-by-five soccer field pitches in their neighborhood. And they’d do that, it was a tradition that had been going on for decades. One Sunday they turned up there, and the field was completely overrun by white guys wearing Dropbox T-shirts. And they were like, “Well, this is our field.” And the guy turn...

Somehow I ended up at Alex Steffen's 2008 piece about optimism (this link is to a lightly edited 2016 version). Optimism is a political act. Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. ... Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular culture, but, in reality, cynicism in average people is the attitude exactly most likely to conform to the desires of the powerful — cynicism is obedience. ... Optimism, by contrast, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary. Where no one believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe. Where no one bel...