Being creative can be tough when bad news abounds.  Yet taking the creative, challenging coach role through turbulence is a hero’s journey that matters greatly as we recover and build anew. What does it mean to be a trusted change advisor in today’s turbulent times? My colleague, Liz Guthridge, wrote a helpful post about the [...]

What makes for a healthy, “anti-fragile” (adaptable, responsive) organization today?   These slides from my recent presentation to the Michigan Management Labor Association’s (MMLA) presentation on Wellness –A Healthy Engagement: Organizational and Personal Fitness provide insights on tools to help.  Wellness –A Healthy Engagement: Organizational and Personal Fitness from Deb Nystrom “The best way to predict [...]

Random, extreme events:  What to do in a world we don’t understand.  Is it possible to develop characteristics to emulate strengths in nature in becoming anti-fragile as described by former wall street trader, now academic, Nassim Nicholas Taleb? Bio:  Nassim N. Taleb is a former derivatives trader who became a scholar and philosophical essayist in [...]

Join me and my Coach Café Ann Arbor colleagues to learn about how coaching can support your success through one of our coaching demonstrations or workshops during International Coaching Week, May 20-26, 2013. Of all clients who have engaged a coach, 99% report satisfaction with the coaching experience, 70% report improved work performance, 80% report [...]

Tensions among senior staff in universities seem to be making the news on a regular basis. Examples include leader strife at Rutgers (blame), Penn State (cascade failure to deal with a crime) and University of Virginia (abrupt leadership goings and comings.) Last year Forbes described the University of Virginia‘s Board of Visitors vote to unanimously reinstate [...]

Learn how to move out of the shallows of those old introvert & extrovert labels. What’s best used as a combo with other aspects of personality?  Introversion and Extroversion.   The famed psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, is one of the few that has added clarity to the oversimplification or archaic use of introversion [...]

Are you experiencing prolonged harassment?  It may be that you may have just encountered a bully, and for women, it can be similar to experiencing an adult “mean girl.” As the number of women in the workforce and in leadership has increased, stress in leadership roles has naturally affected women, as it does men,  in [...]

Entre-Slam is an entrepreneurial story telling competition held in Ann Arbor. Storytelling is powerful.  This was also a great way to illustrate story-telling as important to change and communicating complex ideas, including my history in organization development.   In my situation, this was a signal to myself to enter the speaking circuit.  I also wanted to [...]

“There isn’t anything so practical as” a good model to help leaders, change agents and advocates explain what is happening in change and transition, paraphrasing Kurt Lewin.  An informed change leader can head off the deadly effects of compliance and indifference and increase true, community commitment with a good set of tools, facilitation skills and change research, informed by timely [...]

Netflix culture and their lack of need for leadership development is SO attractive, like the siren song of Greek myth.  It creates great press for Netflix, yet it is so un-duplicatable without the right staffing & culture values mix.   Once again, culture trumps strategy every time.  Helping culture to shift using smart, agile strategy [...]