This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Moshé Feldenkreis, fully Moshé Pinchas Feldenkrais
Make your training a habit. If you choose a convenient time, you will be able to abide by regular exercises. If you make it difficult, you will soon find a-hundred-and-one alternatives instead. Occasionally break the regularity. Do not make your habit a compulsion.
The purpose of training is to tighten up the slack, toughen the body, and polish the spirit.
Do not stare into the eyes of your opponent: he may mesmerize you. Do not fix your gaze on his sword: he may intimidate you. Do not focus on your opponent at all: he may absorb your energy. The essence of training is to bring your opponent completely into your sphere. Then you can stand where you like.
Be grateful even for hardship, setbacks, and bad people. Dealing with such obstacles is an essential part of training in Aikido.
Training |
National Commission on Excellence in Education NULL
While the national conversation about education would never be the same, stunningly few of the Commission’s recommendations actually have been enacted. Now is not the time for more educational research or reports or commissions. We have enough commonsense ideas, backed by decades of research, to significantly improve American schools. The missing ingredient isn’t even educational at all. It’s political. Too often, state and local leaders have tried to enact reforms of the kind recommended in A Nation at Risk only to be stymied by organized special interests and political inertia. Without vigorous national leadership to improve education, states and local school systems simply cannot overcome the obstacles to making the big changes necessary to significantly improve our nation’s K-12 schools
Conversation | Education | Enough | Research | Risk | Time | Leadership |
Nelson Mandela, fully Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
I regard it as a duty which I owed, not just to my people, but also to my profession, to the practice of law, and to the justice for all mankind, to cry out against this discrimination which is essentially unjust and opposed to the whole basis of the attitude towards justice which is part of the tradition of legal training in this country. I believed that in taking up a stand against this injustice I was upholding the dignity of what should be an honorable profession.
Dignity | Duty | Injustice | Injustice | Justice | Practice | Regard | Tradition | Training |
Building a cohesive leadership team is the first critical step that an organization must take if it is to have the best chance at success.
Chance | Organization | Leadership |
Life attracts life… Life can seem either very long or very short, according to how you live it… Life does not play with marked cards. Winning or losing is part of it… Life has many ways of testing a person's will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen all at once… Life is a constant risk, and anyone who forgets this will be unprepared for the challenges that fate may have in store… Life is a game that is spinning faster to dizziness; life is a skydiving game; it gives us the opportunity, we flying and soaring up again; life is a hiking trip; it wants to climb to the pinnacle of your best and feeling angry, upset when you do not control it… Life is an act of faith… Life is falling down 7 times and getting up 8… Life is like a garden, you reap what you sow… Life is like cooking: before choosing what you love, try everything… Life is made of our attitudes. And there are certain things that the gods oblige us to live through. Their reason for this does not matter, and there is no action we can take to make them pass us by… Life is one long training session, in preparation for what will come. Life and death lose their meaning, there are only challenges to be met with joy and overcome with tranquility… Life is short. Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly… Life is too short to waste time complaining… Life is the moment we're living right now… Life sometimes separates people so that they can realize how much they mean to each other… Life without cause is a life without effect.
Action | Cause | Control | Death | Fate | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Nothing | People | Play | Reason | Right | Time | Training | Wants | Waste | Will | Fate | Forgive | Winning |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked leadership is defined by results not attributes.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Leadership is not magnetic personality — that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not making friends and influencing people — that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to high sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
People | Personality | Vision | Friends | Leadership |
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.
Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
Right | Leadership |
The answers to leadership questions are in the inner world. But they are needed in the outer world. Leaders therefore understand both worlds. And they know how to bring what is in the inner world into the outer world. We call that 'crossing the line,' for leaders exist at this point of intersection. It is what gives leadership thinking its unique edge.
Thinking | Unique | World | Leadership | Understand |
Reflection doesn't take anything away from decisiveness, from being a person of action. In fact, it generates the inner toughness that you need to be an effective person of action -- to be a leader. Think of leadership as some of two vectors: competence.
Action | Need | Leadership | Think |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
Our prevailing leadership myths are still captured by the image of the captain of the cavalry leading the charge to rescue the settlers from the attacking Indians.
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
The dictionary -- which, unlike the computer, is an essential leadership tool -- contains multiple definitions of the word mission; the most appropriate here is, "purpose, reason for being." Vision, by contrast, is "a picture or image of the future we seek to create," and values articulate how we intend to live as we pursue our mission. Paradoxically, if an organization's mission is truly motivating it is never really achieved. Mission provides an orientation, not a checklist of accomplishments. It defines a direction, not a destination. It tells the members of an organization why they are working together, how they intend to contribute to the world. Without a sense of mission, there is no foundation for establishing why some intended results are more important than others.
Future | Important | Mission | Organization | Reason | Sense | Leadership |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
At its heart, the traditional view of leadership is based on assumptions of peoples’ powerlessness, their lack of personal vision and inability to master the forces of change, deficits which can be remedied only by a few great leaders.
Vision | Leadership |
Unless we respect the reality of the inner world, commensurate in importance with that of the external world, we are not equipped to understand the full meaning of leadership nor are we able to improve it dramatically, radically. Seeing only half of reality makes us only half a leader. Acknowledging only fifty percent of what is true, gives us a maximum of fifty percent effectiveness as a leader.
Meaning | Reality | Respect | Respect | Leadership | Understand |
The leadership mind is spacious. It has ample room for the ambiguities of the world, for conflicting feelings, and for contradictory ideas.
Mind | Leadership |
Authentic leaders have absorbed the fundamental fact of existence -- that you can't get around life's inherent contradictions. The leadership mind is spacious. It has ample room for the ambiguities of the world, for conflicting feelings, and for contradictory ideas. I believe that the central leadership attribute is the ability to manage polarity.
Ability | Existence | Mind | Leadership |