Leave it to John, Paul, George, and Ringo to remind us over all of 2 minutes and 18 seconds to seek Help to "get my feet back on the ground."  Yet, when they were "younger, so much younger than today," they "never needed anybody's help in any way." Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University adds to this impression in his New York Times "Opinion Page" piece on May 10th, titled, "Young Minds in Critical Condition." He offers his views of the role of a liberal education, including "When we learn to read or look or listen intensively, we are, at least temporarily, overcoming our own blindness by trying to understand an experience from another's point of view. We are not just developing techniques of problem solving; we are learning to activate potential, and often to instigate new possibilities.....We risk seeing a different way of living not as something alien, but as a possibility we might be able to explore, and even embrace."

 

Leave it to Edgar Schein, in his latest book, Humble Inquiry, to share a story of when he "once asked a group of management students what it meant to them to be promoted to "manager." They said without hesitation, "It means I can now  tell others what to do."   He adds, "Of course, the dangerous and hidden assumption in that dictum is that once people are promoted that they will then know what to do. The idea that the manager might come to a subordinate and ask, "What should we do?" would be a considerable abdication, failure to fulfill your role.   If you are a manager or a leader, you are supposed to know what to do, or at least appear to know."

 

If your independence seems to vanish in the haze, we welcome you to join with peers who are eager to get their inquiry feet back on the ground with their participation in our

2014 Forum.    We invite you to join us in Los Angeles, California, from June 18th through 22nd, on the campus of California State University, Northridge (CSUN).  This year, our ever timely focus will be;