Evolutionary Provocateur

Last January, twenty-one business strategists, Agile/Lean practitioners met in Stoos, Switzerland to talk about the mess management is in. Out of that has grown the Stoos movement, a community of business professionals world-wide who believe that by challenging the status quo, a better way can be found for business, management and the role of business in society as a whole. Here, Dawna talks to John Styffe, self-sustainability coach and one of the founding members, about the origins of Stoos, the emergence of Satellites and about #LESS2012 where the Stoos conversation will be continued.

Erwin van der Koogh, Chief Wow Officer at Erronis, has a vision. It is to turn how we manage and change organizations upside down. The old style of management has served us well but a new style is emerging to meet new challenges. The in-between phase is messy. Listen in as Dawna and Erwin sit at a coffee shop on the streets of Amsterdam and talk about the Stoos Stampede, career change, and the role of storytelling to create effective change.

The recent financial crisis2019s and ethical breaches challenge business and business schools to rethink their role in society along with how leaders both develop and adapt. Professor Ken Starkey, Head of the Management Division for the Management and Organisational Learning at Nottingham University Business School explores why we are stuck on short term thinking, and what role business schools and business leaders can play to return to restore 2018humanomics2019 and care in what we do and how we do it as a basic part of business sustainability. Will business schools accept responsibility for their part in short term-ism? Will they step up to a role as agents of change? Ken Starkey2019s current research, teaching and consulting interests include: leadership, management education, sustainable strategic management, and organization and the art of design. He has published articles in leading journals such as Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Learning & Education, Strategic Manageme

Most companies can readily articulate what they do and how they do it, but great companies inspire customers to come to them. With the competition for customer's attention increasing, knowing how to change the game from attempting to motivate a transaction to inspiring loyalty can make customer retention much easier. Simon Sinek started as a student of anthropology and then applied his interest to understanding who great leaders lead great companies and what sets them apart from the crowd. Here, he explains how and why to start with "why".

In an environment of absolutes such as "adapt or die" there is room for creativity and a higher level of awareness. Max Mckeown, author of Adaptability, shares stories that show how, by being creatively adaptive, even the apparently hopeless situations can be transformed into radical change. Adaptability can open up possibilities when there appears to a single option while, moving from idea to execution without being clear on the context can result in case examples like Borders versus Amazon. Loaded with practical examples, Max dives deep into what the value of adaptability is for business now.

Dr. John MacDonald is known as a true visionary and entrepreneur in the space technology and renewable energy industry. Prior to helping establish Day4 Energy in 2001, Dr. MacDonald co-founded MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates (MDA), Canada’s largest space technology company. In his role with MDA he played an instrumental part in many of the organization’s highest achievements, including the RADARSAT-2 spacecraft. Prior to MDA, Dr. MacDonald held a faculty position in engineering at UBC and MIT for a total of 12 years.

Dov Seidman, author of "How! Why how we do anything means everything", talks to Dawna Jones about what it takes for business to become resilient in a world where the Occupy movement raises fundamental questions about the role of business in society. Too many organizations are scrambling to cope with uncertainty and complexity by relying on old strategies, he says. But Dov's research explains exactly what companies must do in order to move away from measuring ‘how much’, to start restoring integrity and start understanding true value. Dov Seidman is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of LRN. He has been called by FORTUNE Magazine “the hottest advisor on the corporate virtue circuit.” Leading companies such as Disney, Dow Chemical, eBay, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Raytheon, and 3M turn to LRN to help management govern more effectively and workers do the right things the right way, even in the most challenging of situations. Dov is a Harvard Law School graduate who also earned a bachelor's

The Global Leadership Forecast presents five skills to address what research shows is a crisis of leadership. But these five skills aren't going deep enough to unleash human potential. In this program, Dawna Jones outlines the five inner skills that equip leaders to navigate uncertainty with greater ease and to use it to advantage.

As the global markets suffer further jitters, Dawna Jones talks to Dr Carl Callerman about how the role of money as the sole purpose for business and enterprise appears to be changing. In this two-part interview, Dr Callerman puts forward an entirely new way of seeing the role of business in society.

In part two of Dawna's interview with ecopreneur Kemp Edwards they explore a range of topics: • • Is using sustainability as a strategy about being ethical or is it recognition that nature's principles apply to business? • • How does service to community impact employee engagement? • • What power do consumers have to affect business accountability? • • Why some businesses (Boomers) struggle with failure to 'execute'? • • What can businesses do to restore credibility when it comes to reporting social and economic responsibility?

Kemp Edwards is a Canadian Gen X eco-entrepreneur who started out as a graduate from Queens University with an honors degree in Philosophy. Taking a creative leap away from philosophy and into the action sports industry, Kemp spent ten years in that business before acting on his inspiration to merge business interests with a desire to create a world he wanted to live in and leave to his two kids. In this interview, he shares how inspiration lead to the growth of two his two eco-businesses: www.Ethicalprofiling.com, which helps companies make ethical purchasing decisions through sourcing high quality socially and environmentally friendly products, and FuGen. His second company, www.FuGenDesign.com matches charitable organizations and causes with retail partners to bring eco and socially conscious products to the consumer. The network of benefits means everyone wins. It is the model of partnerships between businesses, consumers and non-profit activists co-creating shared value through being envi

Kemp Edwards is a Canadian Gen X eco-entrepreneur who started out as a graduate from Queens University with an honors degree in Philosophy. Taking a creative leap away from philosophy and into the action sports industry, Kemp spent ten years in that business before acting on his inspiration to merge business interests with a desire to create a world he wanted to live in and leave to his two kids. In this interview, he shares how inspiration lead to the growth of two his two eco-businesses: www.Ethicalprofiling.com, which helps companies make ethical purchasing decisions through sourcing high quality socially and environmentally friendly products, and FuGen. His second company, www.FuGenDesign.com matches charitable organizations and causes with retail partners to bring eco and socially conscious products to the consumer. The network of benefits means everyone wins. It is the model of partnerships between businesses, consumers and non-profit activists co-creating shared value through being environmentall

In part two of Dawna's interview with Chris Laszlo they explore how to engage the C-suite in sustainability initiatives, moving past it is either the economy or the environment and look at the value of disruptive innovation to take advantage of improving stewardship of ecological capital.

Embedding sustainability into business operations offers a competitive advantage that is finally catching on with mainstream business. This is part 1 of this interview with Chris Laszlo, author of "The Sustainable Company".

The second half of the talk with Richard Barrett continues with a peek at the personal practice of personal transformation. Rapidly changing external conditions impact everyone whether it is your personal life, organizational life or, as events in Egypt illustrate, larger structures that guide Nations. Mastery of our inner world, right down to clearing the lens we perceive the world through is requisite to achieving higher levels of consciousness; the tool, the enabler for successfully collaborating on complex issues at any level, from global to personal. Commitment to self-actualization by consistently transforming to higher levels of consciousness becomes the tool for staying functional, engaged and achieving fulfillment for the common good.

The Evolutionary Provocateur bi-monthly show is for executives, managers, and supervisors (OR for leaders at all levels) who have noticed that it is not what you know but who you are that has the biggest impact. Dawna Jones, the show's host, believes that by raising awareness and understanding we can make a quantum leap to a new level of innovation in business - but it has to be done collectively. What better way to do it than by provoking the evolution of how you see yourself and your role!

Rod Collins is the former chief operating executive of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employee Program (FEP), one of America's largest and most successful business alliances, with over $19 billion in annual revenues. Using the principles and the practices of wiki-management, under Rod's leadership, FEP set new records in operational performance. The secrets? Shifting from leveraging the intelligence of the few to the collective knowledge of the many. Dawna talks to Rod about what wiki-management is and why it is the only game in town for changing how we manage in complexity. Rod is the author of the book Leadership in a Wiki World: Leveraging Collective Knowledge to Make the Leap to Extraordinary Performance.

VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, complexity and Ambiguity. These set the context for business operations and, in the big picture, the evolution of enterprise including institutional and non-profits. Everyone is a change agent in a climate of complex adaptation but change imposed from the top down as a reaction to these variables sets up resistance. People prefer to choose change. When organizations exit the trajectory of adaptive change for safer, more familiar ground they miss the moment to inject personal mastery, personal confidence and security not grounded in outer conditions but grounded in inner courage, resiliency and knowing that stepping into the gap is the only means to use this environment to innovate. Dawna speaks with Dr. Carol Mase, author of an article on Adaptive Change. Carol has an extensive education in medical and social sciences and has worked as an entrepreneur, global marketing executive, and organizational coach-consultant. She brings the 'new sciences' of complexity, neuroscience, an

When the emotional charge of a stressful event remains unaddressed the long term consequences can be serious. In part 2 of the interview with Dr.Nelie Johnson, she describes how depression serves to keep an individual safe when events conflict with ability to express oneself, to protect your ‘territory’ and what happens when those conflicts are not resolved. Learn how you can spot the signals that say the working environment may not be working for you and how to avoid depression. As it turns out, companies that continue to direct employees contribution over a goal-oriented collaborative approach might just be creating the costs of stress and the loss of human creativity and talent.

While the costs of stress-related absenteeism and disability vary from country to country, no one can argue that productivity and quality of life suffer when an employee or someone you care about is dealing with a stress-related illness. The biological dynamic of stress is straightforward. Stress originates when the external environment or your internal belief system provides instructions to cells that work against your well-being. Research by the Heart Math Institute explains that stress originates when the emotional and cognitive centers are out of alignment: thinking one thing and feeling another, for example. To understand what individuals and businesses can do to take back their health at home and in the workplace Dawna speaks to Dr. Nelie Johnson, a family physician who became frustrated with the limitations of conventional medicine to get to the root of the matter. Dr. Johnson’s discovery revealed the quantum aspect of disease: the thoughts, emotions and beliefs that directly inform healing. L