Join us tomorrow for either (or both!) of these great with Professor Nancy Koehn and Dr. Thomas Wolf.

11:40 a.m.–1:00 p.m.
Darman Seminar Room, CPL (RSVP required—Lunch provided to all RSVPs)
CPL Leadership Research Seminar
Nancy Koehn, Harvard Business School, "Lunch with Lincoln."
Professor Koehn will lead a lunchtime discussion about the most important leadership lessons of Abraham Lincoln's presidency.

6:00–8:00 p.m.
Darman Seminar Room, CPL (Please RSVP to Carlos Noguera)
Dr. Thomas Wolf, WolfBrown Consultants, "Arts, Sustainability, and Responsibility"
In this interactive workshop, Dr. Wolf will review his work and methodology in consulting for over 40 years in the fields of philanthropy, education and the arts. Participants will be put into teams to practice diagnosis and design skills with a case study prepared by Dr. Wolf. Join us to learn more about the relationship between art and leadership and try your hand at consulting in the field of Arts and Leadership. Participants will also receive a copy of Dr. Wolf’s soon to be published work: Collaboration and Community: A Manual for Sustainability.

Here's a look at our upcoming events...

• 3/2–3/3 — Gleitsman Social Change Film Forum
• 3/6 — "Lunch with Lincoln" with Nancy Koehn
• 3/6 — "Arts, Sustainability, and Responsibility" with Dr. Thomas Wolf
• 3/8 — "The CEO of 'Me, Inc.'" with Susanne Goldstein
• 4/4 — "The End of Leadership" with Barbara Kellerman & Rhakesh Khurana
  
• 4/10 — "Learning to Lead" with Ron Heifetz, Dean Williams, and Sinead O'Flanagan
• 6/23–6/30 — Latino Leadership Initiative, cohort 3

And others of note from around the University and beyond...

• 3/5 — "Identifying the Markets for Social Ventures" (HBS SE Workshop Series)
• 3/6 — "Case Studies of Social Ventures and Entrepreneurs" (HLS OPIA)
• 3/7 — Film screening: "Inside Job" (Safra)
• 3/7 — Harvard Decision-Making Workshop with Laurie Santos
• 3/7 — "Meetup and the Bottom-up Revolution in Politics" with Scott Heiferman (Shorenstein)
• 3/8 — "Ethics, Governance, and National Economic Performance" with Charles Ferguson (Safra)
• 3/14 — Harvard Decision-Making Workshop with Drazen Prelec
• 3/16 — LAST DAY to apply for MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition
• 3/19 — The President's Challenge: Proposal Submission Deadline (iLab)
• 3/21 — "What Makes a Great Social Entrepreneur?" (HBS SE Workshop Series)
• 5/31–6/1 — 3rd Berlin Forum on Innovation in Governance (Technische Universität Berlin)
• 6/9 — Milken-Penn GSE’s 2nd Annual Education Business Plan Competition
• 6/11–6/12 — Personal Democracy Forum 2012
• 10/24–10/27 — 2012 ILA Conference

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The CEO of "Me, Inc.": How to Use Your Personal Career Brand to Define Who You Are and What You Want to Be in the World

Speaker: Susanne Goldstein (MC/MPA ’04)
Date: Thursday, March 8
Time: 4:00–5:30 p.m.
Location: Darman Seminar Room, Center for Public Leadership

This event is open to HKS students. Space is limited to 32 students on a first-come, first-served basis. No RSVP is necessary.

Branding is the backbone of any successful business enterprise. It conveys the heart and soul of a company, its products, its reputation, and its values. You must be aware that you are an enterprise with a brand. And whether you are a solo-practitioner, run a company or work for someone else, you are the CEO of "Me, Inc." In this highly interactive session, expert careerist Susanne Goldstein will show you the components of Personal Career Branding and how to apply them to your business, your job search and even your life.

Session takeaways:

• You are a brand that must be Defined, Designed, Developed and Deployed.
• Know who and what you want to be by identifying the intersection of your Passions, Interests & Skills.
• Understand your personal Contribution Style and how it will help you surround yourself with the right kind of collaborators.
• Identify the Size of Stage upon which you play best and make sure that's where you are playing.
• Define success by knowing what you want out of your work.

Susanne Goldstein is an author, business strategist, master storyteller, practical problem solver, career expert, filmmaker, engineer, user experience designer who has helped countless individuals, teams, companies, and audiences define what success means to them, and then accelerate their ability to achieve it. Her diverse experience, enthusiasm and tell-it-like-it-is style provide the inspiration for her workshops, speeches, best-selling book Carry a Paintbrush: How To Be the Artistic Director of Your Own Career. Still working in the trenches as a business strategist and software architect, Susanne has worked with over 70 clients in the private, non-profit and academic sectors including Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, OpenTable.com and Microsoft. Susanne is a 2004 graduate of the Mid-Career Program at HKS.

In recent blogs, I've been writing about adaptive challenges and the habits of mind that can improve your ability to make progress on these tricky issues. Today we’ll look at a third transformational habit: seeing the system.

We all know that seeing the system is important, but the various system-seeing tools and techniques can be awfully hard to get your head around—much less actually use in practice. One organization I worked with was being torn apart by an internal feud: do we work to gain more market share by being more innovative, or do we work to gain more market share by being sure that our products are of the highest possible quality?

The debate pitted two vice presidents against each other, and things were getting ugly. Part of the organization was focused on innovation and on learning through failure. Another part was focused on standard operating procedures and zero tolerance for poor quality. You can imagine how people with those different goals started to despise each other. These groups—led by their respective VPs—were pushing in opposite directions.

Both groups needed to see the whole system into which their work fit. In order to try this out, they used Barry Johnson's elegant and simple polarity management tool to turn the two issues they were wrestling with into a two-by-two matrix. Instead of adopting the more traditional approach of listing pros and cons of each side of the innovation-quality control polarity, they listed both the good and bad things about each:

• Quadrant One: the benefits of focusing on innovation
• Quadrant Two: the benefits of focusing on quality control
• Quadrant Three: the downsides of focusing on innovation
• Quadrant Four: the downsides of focusing on quality control.

This made it possible for members of the two groups to hold both opposing forces (or perspectives) at the same time—and to get the best of both rather than swinging from pole to pole (or fighting over which is better). Suddenly, a map of the whole system was in front of them. If they focused too much on innovation, they’d lose their customer base and the solid platform that made their business profitable in the first place. If they focused too much on quality control, they’d be left behind, and their products—no matter how excellent—would be obsolete.

Using a simple tool to see the system let the group understand that the war they thought they had been waging—between quality and innovation—was not a war at all, but two pieces of the same success story. They began to try to incorporate both pieces into all their work. When even that felt impossible, the groups sought to find ways to show more support for the work of their colleagues. Using a tool to get them to see the system changed what they thought was possible.

Because most of us are wired more to analyze—literally, to break things down into component parts—than to look across at systemic influences of the whole, seeing the system generally requires a set of tools and practices that people can use individually or in groups. Polarity management is one helpful systems tool, but there are lots of others that can help us strengthen this third transformational habit of mind. As with the other two habits—asking different questions and taking multiple perspectives—the more you stretch your mind, the bigger your perspective will be, and the more you’ll be able to handle complexity and ambiguity—not to mention the proficiency you'll develop in solving tough problems.

Jennifer Garvey Berger is a partner in the leadership development consultancy Cultivating Leadership. In April, she'll be leading a daylong workshop at CPL on April 15 titled "“Writing the Next Chapter: Shaping Spirit and Circumstance into Flourishing Leadership." She'll also be speaking about her new book, Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders for a Complex World.

Join us for the 2012 Gleitsman Social Change Film Forum honoring exceptional documentary films from this year's Sundance Film Festival—and experience film's power to arouse emotions, change minds, and improve the world.

In just three days we'll kickoff the Film Forum with a panel off filmmakers at The Charles Hotel. You can RSVP for either Friday or Saturday, or both. Only a few tickets are left, so reserve yours today!