By: Andrea Lathrop on October 17, 2019
I have taken my time with A Failure of Nerve and dismissed all the usual reading hacks for this one. I decided this summer that this would be one I would read and digest slowly based on the high recommendation from several mentors. I have not been disappointed. I am benefiting from Friedman’s thoughts on…
By: Digby Wilkinson on October 17, 2019
A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix was written ten years after Edwin Friedman’s death by permission of his family trust along with the editorial work of Margaret W. Treadwell and Edward W. Beal.[1] At its core, the book is an attempt to apply the societal regression theory of Murray Bowen…
By: Jenn Burnett on October 17, 2019
It was a number of years ago now, while watching a parenting video, when the teacher informed me that my first job as a parent was to be in control of myself.[1] Our home was often wrought with anxiety as we navigated layers of challenging circumstances. I remember thinking of my emotional, rambunctious, sometimes rebellious…
By: Mario Hood on October 17, 2019
In 1983, Apple launched its computer Lisa, and the last project Jobs worked on before he was let go. Jobs released Lisa with a nine-page ad in the New York Times spelling out the computer’s technical features. It was nine pages of geek talk nobody outside NASA was interested in. The computer bombed. When Jobs…
By: Rhonda Davis on October 16, 2019
I am grateful for GPS. It gives me turn-by-turn directions, but it also gives me an estimated time of arrival. I can even let my GPS know when I need to arrive at a destination, and I will be notified when I need to leave. Since I live in an urban area that is under…
By: Harry Fritzenschaft on October 16, 2019
Edwin Friedman (1932-1996) was a practicing family therapist, leadership consultant, and ordained rabbi (Reform Judaism). Friedman applied his four-decade work with family systems thinking to leadership applications. His innovative perspective on leadership was more about a way of thinking and being than about traditional leadership technique emphases. Because of his innovative approach to leadership, his…
By: Rev Jacob Bolton on October 16, 2019
I took our weekly Zoom call this week while I was on the road, somewhere in rural Virginia. “Zooming in” from my phone does not allow me to see everyone’s face at the same time, nor does it allow me to reply to the chat messages I receive (public, private or otherwise!) as quickly as…
By: Sean Dean on October 14, 2019
As I sit to write this post there is a new meme online where the President of the United States goes on a shooting rampage in a church killing all those who oppose him. It is in every way vile. There are many things that could be said about it, but mostly I wonder what…
By: Jenn Burnett on October 13, 2019
I recently returned from a trip to London and Oxford. This was my first proper trip to England and I went with a deep curiosity of what might feel familiar to my Canadian/Australian experiences and what would seem different. I would compare my sentiments to those of trying to understand my parents. While they are…
By: John Muhanji on October 13, 2019
It is incredible how Peter Frankopan, a senior research fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, and a historian, brings out the silk road world model that is taking shape and has been from the ancient period. Just as the Quaker church has been evolving from its inception of the 17th century, the silk road has also…
By: Mary Mims on October 12, 2019
As a youth, Peter Frankopan was disenchanted by the version of history he learned as he studied the map of the world. Frankopan was uneasy about the relentlessly narrow geographic focus of his classes at school, which concentrated solely on western Europe and the United States and left most of the rest of the world…
By: Nancy VanderRoest on October 12, 2019
The Silk Road is a book about the new history of the world. The author shares with us that to truly understand new history, we must first understand the astounding past and the history of the nations.[1] Frankopan’s focus was looking at the past not from the perspective of the winners of history, but instead…
By: Digby Wilkinson on October 12, 2019
Until recently, writing history without acknowledging ones cultural biases was a relatively simple matter. Now, however, in the age of the internet and global perspectives, such actions are not only unacceptable, but they are also immediately challengeable. This blog site we write in is live to the world, and it is read, analysed and critiqued…
By: Harry Fritzenschaft on October 11, 2019
Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World links ancient Greece and Rome to what we now call the Middle East (perhaps more accurately the Near East). After that, Frankopan locates the geographical and historical strategic epicenter of the globe somewhere between the Middle East and Central Asia. These two areas were linked…
By: Wallace Kamau on October 11, 2019
There is an interesting story in East Africa that Swahili language was born along the East African coast through the interaction of the indigenous African Bantu language group with the Arabs. The story goes that Swahili is healthy in Tanzania and Zanzibar, fell sick when it got to Kenya, died in Uganda and was buried…
By: Tammy Dunahoo on October 11, 2019
Chess is believed to have originated in Eastern India, c. 280–550, in the Gupta Empire, where its early form in the 6th century was known as chaturaṅga (Sanskrit: चतुरङ्ग), literally four divisions [of the military] – infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariotry, represented by the pieces that would evolve into the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook, respectively. Thence it spread eastward and westward along the Silk Road.[1] While reading The…
By: Karen Rouggly on October 10, 2019
I was never a gangly teenager. Sure, I was awkward, and unsure, and brash, but never gangly. My husband, however, was very gangly. While I never knew him in that time, I see pictures that go from boyish bowl cuts to all neck with a protruding adam’s apple in the span of one school year.…
By: Andrea Lathrop on October 10, 2019
Disorienting. This is the best word I can find to describe The Silk Roads and its effect upon me. Frankopan takes on a mammoth challenge to tell the long, convoluted history of the silk roads throughout Asia and the Middle East and to “inspire those who read this book to look at history in a different…
By: Harry Edwards on October 10, 2019
Reading this new historical tome by Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads reminded me of my favorite quote which sums up the atrocities in the Middle Ages: “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”1 It’s a gruesome picture but in many ways accurate. Frankopan’s project…
By: Mario Hood on October 10, 2019
At one point in the not so distant past, there was one view of history. The dominant power largely determined that view. In his book The Silk Road, Peter Frankopan, a Senior research fellow at Worcester College and the director of the Centre for Byzantine Research from Oxford University, sets out to rewrite history or…
