I’ve been intrigued by this quote from St. Francis of Assisi for some time:
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
Monthly Archives:
October 2012
Choose your favorite writer
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Adrian -
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Jason -
Jennifer
Thriveal just finished up our annual learning gathering. It was called Deeper Weekend – and, boy, did we go deep!
My take-away from the learning gathering is that we are not only leaders of CPA firms, we are Creative Directors. That is, we are directors of the creativity that flows through our firms. This ‘flow of creativity’ is something to recognize, manage, enhance and ultimately sell to our customers. This creativity that we all have is something accountants often suppress. But we attempted to tap into it at this event. I think we got there for so many. It was exciting to see people challenged to enter into an unknown world of being creative, working toward the goal of changing the lives of their customers. It was uncomfortable, compelling and changing.
This week, a bunch of CPAs were learning about “design thinking” from my friend Jason Blumer. They were learning to take a real interest in their clients (isn’t that crazy?) in order to help their clients grow and get better. Suffice to say… these aren’t your typical accountants!
As part of the experience, Jason brought in a few of his own clients and local business owners to serve as guinea pigs or lab rats. (I was just going to go with lab rat, but lab rats are injected or exposed to all kinds of funky chemicals before the chemicals are packaged for people to use or ingest… or something like that. Guinea pigs seem relatively useless but are probably better looking. So let’s go with guinea pig.)
I have been enjoying Love Works by Joel Manby. It’s a leadership book. It’s one of those books that, when you are reading it – or listening, in my case – you’re thinking, “Exactly!” the whole time. It’s like you already knew the concepts, but it took another person to articulate them and make sense of them with stories and examples.
Love Defined: Joel Manby defines love as being a verb. It’s not the mushy romantic feeling or the word we use when we REALLY like something. We throw the word love around to mean all sorts of things, but the Greeks had many words for different kinds of love. For the sake of leadership in a work setting, the word for love discussed by Mr. Manby is agape. Agape leaves feelings out of the equation and focuses on commitments and decisions.