In their presentation at the 18th Annual Pegasus Conference, Peter Senge and Betty Sue Flowers spoke about leadership and the role that story and myth play in guiding leaders. Leadership, they argued, is about the future—the story that is created and communicated.
Oftentimes, leaders don’t think that they can alter the story. Senge and Flowers, however, disagree. At every moment, they said, we have the power to create a new story. In fact, the ability to do this is an essential leadership trait. They suggested that one way to create a compelling storyline is to develop plots based on a “purpose to learn,” as opposed to “victim-based” plots. Read More
At the NAEM Forum, in a session called “The EHS Manager as a Change Agent,” Don Ritz and Bruce Huber of Barrick Gold argued that EHS professionals can and must view themselves as change agents in organizations, and presented a process similar to the Seven Steps of EHS Integration developed by Redinger EHS.
In his keynote address at the American Industrial Hygiene Conference and Exposition (AIHCE) in Minneapolis, economist and futurist Jeremy Rifkin stated that the most basic human instinct is to embody relationship—that is, to be connected with others. He spoke of the “struggle to be,” and argued that it is imperative to reach out to and connect with others at work, in our communities, and in society as a whole, and to do so with science behind us. He talked about the spatial change that occurred with the first Apollo flight to the moon in July of 1969. For many, Rifkin said, it was a defining moment in life—there was a spatial change in how we viewed the world and ourselves, and an expansion of mindset way beyond ourselves.