Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity

Submitted by WorkCreatively on Thu, 04/23/2009 - 07:04

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Title	Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity
Publication Type	Book
Pub Year	2002
Authors	Whyte, D.
Publisher	Riverhead Trade
Keywords	creativity, dialogue, ethics, freedom, humanness, leadership, meaning, technology
Notes	dialogue"For real conversation we need a real language. To my mind that is the language not enshrined in business books or manuals but in our great literary traditions. Keats or Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson or Mary Oliver often say more in one line about the invisible structures that make up the average workday than a whole shelf of contemporary business books." leadership, technology"It is one of the tragedies of many organizations that the people placed into positions of power and leadership may have come from a technical background whose previous successes bear little resemblance to the qualities they now need. They need to be human beings attempting to engage other human beings in a conversation with the future. If our language is technical, then the qualities we draw from people will only be of a technical nature. All very well if adaptability and creativity are not needed anymore. Terribly narrow and terribly dispiriting to those who must work in technology's artificial shadow without an understanding of what it is supposed to serve. Technology's lifesaving and life-changing gifts only make sense when cradled by a network of human conversation, a robust conversation that forms a parallel human network just as powerful as our computer networks, holding any technology to standards of sense and meaning, ethics and personal freedom." (p. 239)

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