Dr. Earl R. Smith II

Thursday, 11 September 2008
By Doron Ben-Meir

Most of my blog entries have so far been about venture capital funding – not particularly surprising as it has been my field for the last nine years! Read the rest of this entry »

By Lawrence Casiraya
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 12:09:00 09/12/2008

MUMBAI, India — As a motivational speaker, Guy Kawasaki is blessed with a funky name, a charming smile and sense of humor perfect for delivering slide presentations. Yet he calls himself a “bozo”. Read the rest of this entry »

by Dr. Earl R. Smith II

You might think that self-interest would be the principal drive in the efforts directed towards self-improvement. This should seem particularly self-evident when the individual under consideration is a senior executive who has regular contact with the very senior levels of the company - the board of directors - the advisory board - decision makers within the company’s client base. But often nothing is further from the case. There are some forms of leadership - leadership styles - that seem to tend towards these behaviors. Something in the history of these individuals and in their leadership development that occasionally overrides self-interest and the interests of the company in favor of gratuitous damage to both. In my efforts at coaching these people, I have come to see that the underlying causes reside more in the realm of spirituality than reason and the life coaching rather than executive coaching is most often called for.

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Originally published as “Murders and Unkindnesses” in the Samhain edition of “White Dragon”, 1998.

For centuries the corvids, ravens and crows in particular (corvus corax is the Latin name for the common raven and corvus corone for the carrion and hooded crows), have had a special place in the mythology of various cultures. In modern times this fascination has barely diminished. From Edgar Allen Poe’s literary classic to the film of James O’Barr’s cult graphic novel “The Crow”, these birds still exert a powerful hold over the psyche of a significant fraction of the population. The Goths who paint their faces with white make-up and the weekend warriors who expect Raven to take them to the Otherworld to meet the dead do not see the same animal as the farmers who set up decoys in order to shoot large numbers of them every year in late spring. This is, however, typical of a creature that presents a paradox wherever one looks.

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Do you need an executive coach? Do your managers? Here is a useful framework for thinking about the role of coaching, from Harvard Management Update.

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