The Keynes Centre at UCC

08/03/2024

Happy

To mark this international day, we are sharing an article from our archives about how it is crucial to make sure that our concept of leadership is not gendered. This is an important step in our efforts towards gender equality.

https://theleadershipmind.org/wp/2022/10/25/subverting-the-genderisation-of-leadership/

The Leadership Mind (2nd edition, December 2023) offers such a coherent, sustainable and ungendered concept of leadership.

It is available at bit.ly/48DFqfy, bit.ly/4aK0H9c, all other amazon sites, Waterstones, Cork, and UCC Book Shop bit.ly/3vwKYKG.

Gendering of ‘leadership’ has been deeply ingrained in our everyday, unconscious thinking, especially male thinking, despite all the advances of recent decades.

07/03/2024

World Book Day is upon us and for the occasion we want to recirculate our reading recommendations for the new year.

Remember always that it is not the book as such, but how it is read. It’s about the intent and the attitude with which we read that matters.

- Forgiveness: An Exploration by Marina Cantacuzino
- On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence by Robert M. Pirsig
- The Human Mind: A Brief Tour of Everything We Know by Paul Bloom
- Talking Heads: The New Science of How Conversation Shapes Our Worlds by Shane O’Mara
- Reading for The Love of God by Jessica Hooten
- Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century by Joshua L. Cherniss
- The Real Work: On The Mystery of Mastery by Adam Gopnik
- The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin

For more on each recommendation see here bit.ly/3RPeFPA.

Happy reading! Happy !

06/03/2024

Social Media’s negativity bias and shock value has manipulated how we relate to one another and the world, and as Chris Anderson observes this week in The Guardian, it fuels “our divisions by empowering those who are best at sowing fear, mistrust and outrage”.

It is possible that social media in election times is in particular rife for manipulation.
Social media, then, may not be the best place to go to stop and think about important issues.

Anderson goes on to point to corners of the internet where people have committed to spreading positivity and kindness to combat the algorithms of social media.

This should give us pause to stop and think about what we see on our social media feeds, and whether we allow this to affect how we think. Let’s bring awareness into our engagement with social media. Lets work on how we think.

It is easy to see the world in a pessimistic light, but by tapping into our innate generosity we have the power to change it, says Chris Anderson, the head of TED

05/03/2024

Last week, Ella Creamer observed in The Guardian that the UK is “experiencing a boom in book clubs”.

This is good news because reading is an experience that has the potential to help us to work on our personal development in adulthood.

Thus, we take this opportunity to encourage readers to, as we do in The Keynes Centre, use reading as an opportunity for deliberately enlarging How We Think.

Being oriented to our personal development, the guiding question we ask ourselves as we read a book is: What are the implications for myself?

We recommend you adopt this habit too.

Once nightclubs or sports clubs brought people together. Now there’s a boom in people getting together online and in person to discuss their favourite books

26/02/2024

A quote for personal development.

‘Lojong’ is the Tibetan Buddhist word for the practice of 'training mind' - lo is intellect or ‘mind’ and jong is ‘training’, ‘practice’.

Lojong is the idea that training or practice gives us paths or ways for developing our mind. It points us in the right direction without prescribing details to us. Central to this practice is the injunction to 'train the mind with ‘slogans’ or ‘quotations’ directed towards personal growth.

This is not about chanting and mindlessness. Rather it is to catch our first thoughts as we interact with them and use these responses without negativity for reflection. This is one way we use quotes and we do so through reflection and dialogue with ourselves and others about them.

The key to the practice of lojong is to be open, impartial, and thorough and not to exclude anything that arises in our experiences. In other words, the key to growth is being honest with and about ourselves, about where we are operating from, and about How We Think.

Want more tools for working on your development? Visit theleadershipmind.org/ and ucc.ie/en/keynes/

24/02/2024

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become”

– Ursula K. Le Guin

Great to see this initiative ‘Ireland Reads’ encouraging us to take some time today with a good book www.irelandreads.ie/

Remember always too, that its not the book, its how we read that matters. See our resource on reading with goodwill for more bit.ly/3t1fgUw.

Ireland Reads. On Thursday 25 February we’re inviting people of all ages in Ireland to get reading. Why? Because taking some time for yourself to relax and do the things you enjoy (like reading) is important to help look after your mental wellbeing.

06/02/2024

The wonderful writer Rebecca Solnit has written an incisive satirical piece on a type of writing and commentating we find on social media that does nothing much for our relating with others.

This type of writing lacks what John Maynard Keynes calls “good will”:

“[Reading] means, of course, intelligence and goodwill on the part of the reader. But an author is entitled to presume these qualities.“ -John Maynard Keynes

For Solnit’s Lithub piece, read here lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-how-to-comment-on-social-media/

For our resource on reading with good will, see here: www.ucc.ie/en/media/research/keynes/pdfdocuments/Reading-with-Goodwill-Revised.pdf

1) Do not read the whole original post or what it links to, which will dilute the purity of your response and reduce your chances of rebuking the poster for not mentioning anything they might& #8217…

06/02/2024

Are we aware of the increasingly complex demands of the world on us and are we in tune with our own response to this complexity, including our unease? How do we respond to these demands?

In this year of elections when we are especially called upon to be ‘grown up adults’ and to ‘think for ourselves’, it is important we do not turn away from these demands and engage with the complexity of the world in a serious way.

One way to do this is to accept the ‘invitation’ the world is giving us – as Victor Frankl put it, to answer the questions life is asking of us – that is, to choose to go with the external demands and to prepare for them by intentionally undertaking our development in adulthood.

The type of development we are talking about is based on undertaking developmental experiences where we explore how we currently construct the reality that governs our behaviours.

If you are interested in undertaking such developmental experiences, our book The Leadership Mind (2nd Edition, December 2023) provides such an experience. It is available at bit.ly/48DFqfy, bit.ly/4aK0H9c, all other amazon sites, Waterstones, Cork, and UCC Book Shop bit.ly/3vwKYKG.

01/02/2024

The Leadership Mind integrates leadership and leadership development with personal development and the working through of the argument is a developmental experience. The argument of The Leadership Mind provides:

- a workable, viable, and sustainable concept for thinking about leadership,
- an approach to leadership development grounded on the personal development required for the capability for leadership potential,
- a developmental experience oriented to continuing personal development throughout adulthood.

Working through the argument of The Leadership Mind can change how and what we think about leadership and how to undertake the personal development required for leadership potential. The Leadership Mind can also be approached as being about personal development using the example of leadership as the material for thinking about.

The Leadership Mind differs from other writings on leadership and personal development by its comprehensive and coherent argument, properly integrating leadership with personal development, clearly demarcating management as an organisational function from leadership as a phenomenon of human affairs, and establishing an objective standard for the personal development required for leadership.

The Leadership Mind (2nd Edition, December 2023) is available at bit.ly/48DFqfy, bit.ly/4aK0H9c, all other amazon sites, Waterstones, Cork, and UCC Book Shop bit.ly/3vwKYKG.

30/01/2024

Words matter. They govern how we think.

The words people use provide clues to their mode of thinking.

If that is so, what does using the concept “quality escape” reveal about how the CEO of Boeing thinks. How does “escape” match what was clearly a FAILURE of design, manufacturing, or maintenance, yet to be determined. Not only is the evasiveness revealing, but the cliché dimension is even more concerning, as cliches are substitutes for thinking. (Perhaps he was speaking euphemistically, unless he was being cynical – itself a worse problem, and if so, that also reveals how he thinks.)

For more on how words matter, read our article on here https://bit.ly/48T4aRo.

Our book, The Leadership Mind (2nd Edition, December 2023) is available at bit.ly/48DFqfy, bit.ly/4aK0H9c, all other amazon sites, Waterstones, Cork, and UCC Book Shop bit.ly/3vwKYKG.

25/01/2024

"Is democracy fragile and easily destroyed, or flexible and resilient?" asks Margaret Atwood.

Watch this illustrated video with the renowned author explaining how totalitarianism and chaos threatens the world and how democracy can be sustained - a good watch in this year of many elections.

It is important to add that to sustain democracy, we need to engage in personal development so that we become more aligned with the complexity of the world. This is important so that we do not opt out of life's complexity, electing candidates that promise simplistic solutions, but rather engage with the complexity of the world in a serious way.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. has said, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity”.

The Leadership Mind (2nd Edition, December 2023) shows a way forward for how we can develop ourselves to make our complexity of mind be commensurate with that of the world. Available at bit.ly/48DFqfy, bit.ly/4aK0H9c, all other amazon sites, Waterstones, Cork, and UCC Book Shop bit.ly/3vwKYKG.

In a year in which more than half the world goes to the polls, acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood asks whether democracy is fragile and easily destroyed or flexible and resilient. This animated monologue is the first of four films examining the state of government, representation, rights and freedom

24/01/2024

Our culture is becoming so much about winning a debate rather than participating in a dialogue for the purpose of understanding another. The result is our personal development is stunted as the need to win blocks the real and genuine enterprise of learning and growing. Further, the goal of winning precludes our moving on together. We can easily see this in our private relationships, but it also corrupts the public realm.

In a year when we are going to be thinking so much about politics and governance, it behoves us to attend to what we prefer as our best working attitude in relating with others in the public realm. Letting the ego dictate feelings that we cannot be wrong is not a good place for discussion and conversation.

We can, however, dedicate ourselves to talking and reading together with goodwill and to using the opportunities that will be presented in the public realm for practicing this attitude, rather than turning away in cynicism and pessimism. As Hannah Arendt put it, even in the darkest times we are entitled to illumination - but we must work on it, we must choose the right company to keep, and we must create spaces with others for good conversation. The latter require trust in others coupled with conscious effort to shape a space for dialogue.

To facilitate creating spaces of goodwill for dialogue, we offer a pair of tools courtesy of Susan Oberman of Common Ground Negotiation Services, New York (https://lnkd.in/di3QK5Hq) and The Public Conversations Project of Cambridge, Massachusetts (source acknowledged).

Tool 1: https://lnkd.in/dSihwUJU

Tool 2: https://lnkd.in/d-6-PM9i

Read The Leadership Mind available at bit.ly/48DFqfy, bit.ly/4aK0H9c, all other amazon sites, Waterstones, Cork, and UCC Book Shop bit.ly/3vwKYKG.