Skip to main content

Lunch with Sis

This morning my sister reached out about having lunch together, and Will and I joined her close to her office.

Upon reflection, living walking distance from downtown affords me the ability to take advantage of spontaneous meetings, both social and business.  I recognise how much location factors into well-being.  If I lived further afield, I would easily isolate myself by justifying passing up meetings such as these.

One of the highlights of the lunch discussion for me was Will's interest in leadership, especially in the context of progressive organisations that seek to do away with hierarchy.  This reminds me of a great book that was recommended to me by a mentor: Reinventing Organizations.  We've had discussions in my startup about how we should organise ourselves and structure responsibility.  Being exposed to various organisational structures over our individual careers, it is difficult to align on an ideal for our own startup.

Our discussion helped me recognise that as the leader of reelyActive, I lead the challenge of achieving alignment, which I very much embrace, yet occasionally find to be a source of frustration.  I will think more about what triggers that frustration and what I can do to overcome.

Popular posts from this blog

TechNoel

Answers to the question from Vaughn and Noor.  Art with Eva...

Reminiscing about last year's epic rail journey

Last year today I embarked on an epic rail journey from Montreal to Chicago via Vancouver and Seattle.  This time of the year is pretty much the only time I can completely escape startup life (and Internet connectivity), and a year ago I seized the opportunity to do something I'd been dreaming of since childhood: take "The Canadian" across Canada. Sat down with a beer and watched my videos from that trip (see playlists below) which brought back very fond memories not only of the trip itself, but also of Startical 1.0 which involved a similarly ridiculous Montreal to San Francisco rail journey. The playlists: "The Canadian" - Toronto to Vancouver by rail "The Empire Builder" - Seattle to Chicago by rail Also reminds me of my  Rails and Reels: History, Infrastructure and the IoT blog post from 2013, just after we had become "World's Best Startup".  Somehow rail journeys bring out the philosopher in me...

Evolutionary Purpose

Will and I discussed finding the balance of progress and purpose in organisations (startups and otherwise) which reminded me of the book Reinventing Organizations by Frédéric Laloux which was recommended to me by one of my mentors.  We found the clip above on YouTube (if you're not familiar with Laloux, it's a nice short summary of his work) and one element stood out for me: what he called Evolutionary Purpose . How I understand this concept is that the purpose (or soul) of an organisation evolves over time, rather than an individual or leadership team directing towards a specific outcome.  It's very much in line with the sailboat analogy and the lunch discussion I had with the team. It is very reassuring to me that the people closest to me today all affirmed my feelings on leadership, and interesting that it often took very different paths/context for us to be able to truly connect on the subject.