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Papers
Be the Father
"...The only meaning in our lives is what we each bring to them…No one is any bigger than anyone else.
There are no mothers or fathers for grown ups, only sisters and brothers..." (1)
Or, to put it another way, we are each father and mother to our selves.
But what does that mean? Does that mean being what our own fathers and mothers have been to us?
"Physically, we are conceived from the biological union of mother and father. Psychologically,
we are born from the Great Polarity. Behind the mask of the personal mother and father are the two
primordial archetypes of the Great Mother and Father…In childhood we instinctively compared our objective
parents to the internal 'ideal' parental archetypes. The fundamental need to relate to and be nourished,
protected and guided by the Great Mother and Father was often painfully frustrated by the inadequacies of our
biological parents". (2)
Read the complete document (pdf)
("Be the Father" has been developed into a coaching programme and development tool. For more details please contact Stephen@stephenbarden.co.uk)
Articles
The Team: the heart of Executive Coaching
(Coach and Mentor: Spring 2006)
In the modern, knowledge based (or learning based) organisation, the most immediate context for our executive clients is the team.
It is within these units that the modern organisation conceives, develops and delivers its products and services. It is not 'Apple', or even one person at Apple, that developed the i-pod but a development team.
It was not Johnnie Cochran who successfully defended O.J. Simpson in the murder trial in 1995 but the legal team.
Teams are the pivot points of the modern organisation - within which strategies are developed and delivered; and which, therefore, exercise the most significant influence on the learning and behaviour of the executives within them.
So, why is the team and team coaching still peripheral both to our training of coaches and to so many executive coaching practices?
Read the complete article (pdf)
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Coach mentoring: a survival tool for ethical corporate governance
(Coach and Mentor: spring 2004)
Complex corporations, developing within information laden global constituencies, cannot be run on behalf of small elite of stakeholders by an even smaller group of managers. And the more organisations continue to try to do so, the more they're mistrusted by their customers, governments, employees, investors and so on. So, of course, they then have to spend money (instead of earning it) defending themselves against scrutiny and attacks.
The bottom line is that equitable corporate governance - like any governance - needs to be instilled within the genetic structure of its community. And if it is to be at all equitable it needs to be integrated within the organisation as the ethos of each of its individual members. Not because regulation requires it but because it makes it an extraordinarily cohesive and strong body.
Read the complete article (zipped)
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(1)Sheldon Kopp: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him". Sheldon Press, 1974. p.140
(2)Charles Breaux: "Journey into Consciousness". Published by Nicolas-Hays, 1989
