April
29
“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
Winston Churchill
So are bores!
Our lives are comprised of a constant flow of improvised encounters with others where we pursue our interests while accommodating, one way or another; graciously or not, the interests of others. Life as a negotiated give-and-take. In our day-to-day lives we get along reasonably well by being selectively obedient to the laws of the land and a collection of informal rules that we store in a file called “common sense”. Think of them as a kind of standard repertoire of tunes that we play for any number of recurring social and business transactions that we conduct with our fellow citizens.
March
10
I had something quite different in mind for the March edition of Random Riffs, but CBC changed all that. Last week the Metro Morning radio program ran a series entitled "Toronto's Mosaic: A Reality Check." It began as follows: "Integration has it's challenges. As the population of Toronto becomes increasingly diverse, so too do the ways the cultures interact - but it's interaction that clearly comes with challenges." It doesn't take much to get me sidetracked!
February
04
I have a friend who would listen patiently as I nattered on at length about how the improvising jazz ensemble wasn’t a metaphor for organizations that have to figure out things as they go along, but rather as a real example of such an organization. It is, after all, made up of real people performing with something in mind. That's no metaphor; that’s the real thing. It is, in William O’Brien’s terms, an organization that has figured out how to disperse power without producing chaos. Improvising isn’t winging it! My friend, an admirer of Peter Senge, suggested that many of the things he’d heard me say about jazz I’d likely find in Senge and his work on the learning organization. So I read “The Fifth Discipline” and decided it might be a fun exercise to use the five disciplines as a framework for capturing some of the things I knew to be true about jazz. This is the result of these musings.
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Getting in the Groove is a unique entertainment and learning experience that explores the knowledge and discipline behind the magic of jazz improvisation and its implications for the disciplined enhancement of organizational performance.
