Leslie Pratch on Business, Culture, and the Economy

Posted by Leslie Pratch; written by David Friedman

Today we have a guest blogger, David Friedman, who has a masters from the Yale School of Management and prior to starting his own firm, Bridgewell Partners, was a former partner at McKinsey & Company. David is committed to building trust in relationships.

He writes:

Traditional organizational structures are negative. That is, they are based on dealing with what is missing, or weak, or threatening. They are problem-solving structures, focused on “how can we fix what’s wrong?” You recognize this if you’ve been to a community meeting, or a staff meeting, or a Board meeting, in the past 150 years.

The current positivity movement turns this around. People have been starting to focus on the positive, on what we do have, on our strengths, on our assets. These are opportunistic structures, focused on “what can we do with what we’ve got?” David has listed some examples, including my own Asset Mapping technique and approach. I’d add Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Psychology, and strength-based management to the list.

There is a trap here to watch out for. Very often, folks view and treat positives the way they used to view and treat negatives. That is, we try to use positives for problem-solving. We ask, what are the strengths or assets that we have, and how can use to them to fill our needs?

You see the problem, don’t you? We haven’t really let go of the negatives. We’ve just pushed them around. We’re trying to control and use assets in order to solve certain problems and meet certain needs. Despite the positive terminology, we haven’t really gotten out of the negative approach.

What I have learned is that we get stuck in the negative approach whenever we treat positives as discrete. If we think that we can identify our strengths and assets, name them, codify them, inventory them, and use them, we have not really taken a positive approach.

The real deal is this: in any context and perspective, there is always a negative way to view things, and always a positive way to view things. Positives are reflective, not discrete. The cup is always half-empty, and it is always half-full. Half-full is not a measure. We cannot codify it, or measure it, or prove it. It is a choice. It is a human choice to adopt a positive mindset.

From that positive mindset comes a different way of thinking and acting. This is opportunistic strategy. When we choose to see assets and strengths, we are led to action. We tend to connect our assets with other people’s assets, to get things done together that we could not get done on our own. We discover affinities in the things we do together. That leads us to a sense of larger identity, and to a real strategic vision much greater than anything we could develop around negatives.

Real positive structures are opportunistic. Shifting our mindset, we arrive at a different way of getting things done.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist who trained at Northwestern Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.

David Friedman is a consultant and thinker who cares deeply about people and what happens to us. He can be reached at www.bridgewellpartners.com.

Posted by Leslie Pratch; written by David Friedman

Today we have a guest blogger, David Friedman, a consultant who founded Bridgewell Partners and started the blog Positive Structures. He writes:

If strangers want to collaborate together, they need to know something about each other and how to work together. It would be great if each person would make available the critical information that others need to see, in advance, whether a collaboration is likely to be useful and possible. And to see how best to get started.  Here’s a start on what could be critical:

1. My skills

2. My values

3. Things I am willing to take questions about

4. How best to contact me on different subjects, if you are a known acquaintance (or come referred by a close contact of mine)

5. How best to contact me on different subjects, if you are a stranger to me

6. The time frame in which you can expect a response from me

7. What I am pursuing right now – in case you’d like to try to help me first on something I’m doing (which for most people would be a good way of getting me interested in helping you)

8. How much time and availability I usually make for new inquiries and projects, and whether now is a “usual time”

9. Key members of my social network (perhaps for business people something like my first circle of “LinkedIn” connections) – in case you know any of them. Then, if you happen to know any of them, you can contact them for an introduction (and raise your odds) or else contact them and find out what’s the best way to approach me and what to expect when you do (e.g., “If you send him an email and haven’t heard in two days, try again. He doesn’t mind being re-emailed”)

10. My style of working — perhaps using something like a Meyers-Briggs Type Index, or some other system that many people are familiar with

In fact, if these could be put into a standardized form like something like the Vcard, then they would be searchable. In his blog, Taylor Davidson has coined the phrase “Personal API”; he means something different than I do, but I think the phrase captures well “a machine-readable publicly available version of how best to interact with me.”

Real life examples are hard to find. Here’s a non-machine readable example. It’s wonderful, although it might not encourage you to contact the owner of it, who is a professor of mathematics at UCLA.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist who trained at Northwestern Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or email her at leslie@pratchco.com or visit www.pratchco.com.

David Friedman is a friend who describes himself as a consultant, educator and thinker who cares a lot about people and what happens to us. He is dedicated to creating high integrity individuals beginning with early childhood. He can be reached at  (312) 863-3489 or at Bridgewell Partners.

By Leslie Pratch

A friend sent me this letter, describing it as “one of the best explanations of the Muslim terrorist situation” The author is Dr. Emanuel Tanay.

A Holocaust survivor, Dr Tanay co-authored a book about the survivors of the Holocaust. He wrote:

A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. ‘Very few people were true Nazis,’ he said, ‘but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.

We are told again and again by ‘experts’ and ‘talking heads’ that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.

The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march… It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.

The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority; the ‘silent majority,’ is cowed and extraneous.

Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China ’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.

And who can forget Rwanda , which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were ‘peace loving’?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:

Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence.

Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.

Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts–the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

I forwarded this letter to several friends and in subsequent posts I will share what their reactions were.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from the Northwestern Medical School with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from Chicago Booth and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors of public companies as well as private equity investors to assess and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919 or leslie@pratchco.com or www.pratchco.com.