Possibility! The Voisen Cooperative’s Newsletter
May 2006
May is upon us — a springtime of new beginnings. That said, we look at every day as a chance for new beginnings, an opportunity to look at our lives with a beginner’s mind and see what we can do to make the world a better place.
As usual, we’ve been busy with a variety of projects as we continue to renew and refine our work as consultants, coaches and speakers. This issue of Possibility! gives you a brief look at some of the exciting changes that have taken place in the past two months, but it does intentionally leave out a most exciting “top secret” project that we hope to announce soon. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy the newsletter.
In This Issue …
Expanding the Cooperative
We’re pleased to announce the expansion of The Voisen Cooperative’s unique consulting services with some very exciting new strategic alliances.
First of all, we’ve started a new alliance with Larry Wilson and the partners of the Wilson Collaborative. You may know Larry as the visonary thinker behind his former companies, Wilson Learning and Pecos River, forerunners in the field of leadership development and organizational change leadership. Greg’s friendship with Larry goes back many years, and we’re happy to have rekindled the friendship with this new alliance as facilitators and partners in Larry’s new “Essentials of Leadership” learning series. We hope to be offering this new learning material to our clients shortly. For more information on Larry Wilson and the Wilson Collaborative, visit their web site at www.greatgameoflife.com.
We’re also welcoming Dr. Charles Krueger, professor of management leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, and Alison Whitmire, an independent consultant from Seattle, back into the cooperative as former partners of eLuminate Consulting. For more information on Alison or Dr. Krueger, please take a look at their bios.
Upcoming Never Mind the Noise Workshop
Our next Never Mind the Noise workshop is scheduled for May 25 in Lake San Marcos, California. We continue to have tremendous success with this one-of-a-kind all-day learning experience, and we’re happy to be doing it again. If you’re looking to take a day to slow down, re-examine your priorities, rediscover what is most important to you, and do it all in a warm, community-supported environment, then this is the workshop for you.
Here’s just a sampling of what previous participants have to say:
“Thank you [Greg and Sean] for your clarity, vision, compassion and expertise. Now, more than ever, we all need to be fully present and centered, both personally and professionally. Your workshops and consulting services provide a great opportunity for organizations to innovate, expand and evolve.” — Janet Clemento, CEO, The 9th Element Group
“No matter how much I already gleaned from your seminar, I am highly interested in an ongoing series of workshops to stay focused and clear, continually learn new practices to improve interaction and overcome obstacles, and even just remind myself of all thos practices that I have found with your help to be beneficial in achieving personal and professional achievement and satisfaction.” — Gina Stark, Owner, Madison Leather of Carlsbad
If you would like to sign up for the Never Mind the Noise experience, please give us a call at (888) 337-6416. Space in all of our workshops is limited to 25 participants.
Five Disciplines for Creating High-Performance Companies
As you already know, our goal at The Voisen Cooperative is to help you grow both personally and professionally. Over and over again we tell our clients that “organizations don’t change; people do.” And that is precisely why we put so much emphasis on personal and professional development.
Recently, we’ve begun focusing our consulting efforts on the work of Dr. Peter Senge from the Society of Organizational Learning and the core competencies for leadership and organizational transformation that he outlines in his book The Fifth Discipline. The five competencies, or “disciplines” as outlined by Senge are:
- Personal Mastery — Devoting yourself to a path of life-long learning and self-discovery
- Mental Models — The abillity to resolve tough dilemmas and access new possibilites by remaining open and detached from one set perspective or “mental map” of the world
- Shared Vision — Co-creating a single, unified vision that an entire team strives toward realizing
- Team Learning — The ability to move beyond teams that simply communicate and work well together towards a higher space of group synergy and emergent “team-wide intelligence”
- Systems Thinking — Seeing challenges and opportunities from a broader, non-reactive perspective, a perspective that includes patterns, structures and events instead of just events themselves
By using our initial assessments and then modularizing our consulting approach based on these five disciplines, we are able to focus our efforts on the points of highest leverage to maximize the amount of positive change in leaders and organizations.
If you think that this new Five Discipline approach may be helpful to you or your organization, please contact us and we’ll be glad to discuss our consulting work with you in more detail.
Book of the Month: A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink
In “A Whole New Mind,” author Dan Pink takes a look at the forces at play in the current culture and economy that are going to lead to a new revolution in the workplace — a revolution that begins with tapping into the creative and associative abilities of the right-half of the brain. Pink calls the forces behind this revolution the three “A’s”: abundance, Asia, automation, claiming that as intelligent knowledge workers from up-and-coming Asian nations start to flood the market, Americans and other established workers will have to up the ante by tapping into their creative and innovative capabilities. Through a brief look at six “right-brain-oriented” aptitudes, Pink offers the reader a look at what it will take to succeed in the coming creative economy.