Leadership factories (no thank you), the neutrality of ambition, design thinking, Dr. Gabor Maté , the Buddhist Chef, Doug and the Slugs, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Dame Laura Knight.
1
This McKinsey & Company article, (July 2025) is spot on in regards to what I am witnessing in my work.
- That we need to be purposeful about leadership development within our organizations and communities. The authors didn’t include communities, but I am because leadership is not just about work and it is not just about positional authority – it is about how we do the right thing, wisely as is possible and always ethically, for the benefit of others.
- Successful leaders are easy to recognize. They are characterized by “positive energy, personal balance, and inspiration; servant and selfless leadership; continuous learning and a humble mindset; grit and resilience; levity; and stewardship” (from the article). Echoing my previous point, I’d put this list under the banner of being wise and ethical.
- We need more successful (as in doing the right thing wisely and ethically) leaders.
But, what I dearly hope to not be hearing is myself or others adopting the authors’ language of “leadership factories” (how dystopian and icky is that?) or “building leaders” (wow, that’s cold).
2
The Ambition Trap by Amina AlTai (2025)
I recently recommended this book to someone and then forgot about it. Knowing that “ambition” was in the title I was pretty sure it would be quick to find. It was, but my online search also brought back a flood of books and videos with one-size-fits-all or do-what-I-do to ramp up and win (which I read as crash and burn) with ambition. I find how that stuff is packaged and marketed to us kind of tiring.
Which makes this book all the more important to share in this list.
The author, Amina AlTai, is not saying that ambition is bad or good, but that our relationship to ambition could be healthier.
I have noticed this same thing about our relationships with other aspects of our lives that we value and prioritize, such as love, security, success, or a good cup of coffee. These things are, for the most part, neutral (as in, not inherently good or bad) and yet we struggle and develop, for lots of understandable reasons and habits, overly entangled and often messed up relationships to them.
While the book does slip into a bit of the one-size-fits-all or do-what-I-do format, I’m giving AlTai full credit for inviting us in to our gentler healthier selves. We need more of that.
3
I recently recommended IDEOU to a client and thought, “hey, I should point out this resource to the rest of the gang”, and so let’s considered it pointed out.
I first encountered design thinking some years ago while part of a team project and my mind went sparkly with all the wonderful possibilities of its applications in my work. I wanted to learn more, but I didn’t want to do more formal post-secondary study or become a designer. Thankfully I was introduced to IDEO U (the learning branch of the design company IDEO).
Over time I have taken many courses with IDEO U and a few years ago I did their Human Centered Strategy Certificate* while in the midst of working on a strategic planning project. It was the approach to strategic planning that I wanted but didn’t know what it was. The concept that the strategy is in activation mode from the moment we start designing the process rather than when the completed plan is officially launched, is the awesomesauce of strategic planning. It’s all about the journey; a journey of engagement, design, facilitation, implementation, impact, oversight, learning and improving.
*Cue the eye roll and recall my bit on “our complex relationships with certificates, badges, and external validation”
Speaking of journeys.
Journey enjoying a sunbeam with Duchess, one of his favourite cats.
4
The Myth of Normal, by Dr. Gabor Maté (2022)
It is a little odd that I’m putting this on the list when I haven’t yet read it, despite the many podcasts and interviews I’ve listened to about it.
Once I have read The Myth of Normal, I know that I would enjoy sitting around chatting with others about it.
Let me know if reading this book and then sitting around with me and others chatting (via Zoom) is also for you.
I did read his book, Scattered Minds which brought a much needed change to my personal conversation with ADHD.
5
Extras (slightly off topic, but not really)
- If you’ve been hanging out with me for a while, you know that I have a fondness for not too violent or too creepy legal and police procedurals and well done cozy mysteries (as in BBC late 80s through the 90s cozy mysteries – Joan Hickson is Miss Marple and David Suchet is Poirot). Recently as I got on the stationary bike and was looking for my next watch, I hit play on Death Valley and was like, “too cute, I’m out”. But stayed, chuckled, and decided I wanted to have tea and biscuits with DS Janie Mallowan and John Chapel.
- While digging around in the cheap bin at a bookstore in Saskatoon I encountered, for the first time, the Buddhist Chef. The book’s photos threw me for a moment, not sure how much of a nudge and a wink there is, but I bought it and my plan is to cook my way through it this fall.
- Doug and the Slugs and Me. This documentary is more than the story of having Doug Bennet as your childhood next door neighbour and father of your best friend. It is about how we see something as a child and then see it differently as an adult, how being wrapped up in ourselves causes suffering, and how we can reconnect with and bravely face what went into who we are today. For me the story also reached out to memories of my youth in the 1980s (Doug and the Slugs were every where in Vancouver) and parenting in 1990s East Van. It also reminded me of my long ago desire to create radio documentaries and why I do the work that I do today – because we are stories.
- There is a Dame Laura Knight Society! One moment I’m doing research and the next I’m trying to figure out how I can let drop into a conversation that I’m a member of the Dame Laura Knight Society. Just goes to show the power of serendipity.
- Speaking of serendipity, in the oddest places and in the most delightful conversations Rainer Maria Rilke keeps showing up. Most recently this was having Letters to a Young Poet drop on my head at the local used bookstore while I was trying to reach a book that I was judging by it’s brightly coloured spine (the Rilke book being a dull beige). I am now reading the Rilke.
- More Rilke. On Being with Krista Tippett, “Joanna Macy, In Memoriam:Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us”. Rilke isn’t just for young aspiring poets, as listening to this conversation with these well matured women confirms.
- Rewilding the Human Spirit in the Age of Moral Colonialism: Brian Eno on Carnival as a Model for Saving Culture, by Maria Popova at The Marginalian.It takes courage to resist this moral colonialism, to rewild the human spirit with the insistence that life, allowed its full aliveness, is not a symposium of self-righteousness but a festival of wonder, not a military parade of masses marching behind generals uniformed in the moral fashions of the day but a carnival of felicitous participancy on equal terms — people of all kinds, each costumed in some choice expression of their light, together constellating a collaborative cosmos of belonging to something both transient and transcendent.
- For the first time in over a century, sockeye salmon are able to return to Okanagan Lake (CBC News, August 21, 2025). Every day there is good news about what human beings are capable of doing.
Image from Getty Images on Unsplash