Creating Our Future with Organizations by Design

I was in the grocery store earlier today, on a mission to find potato starch. I’d never bought it before, so I had no idea where to look.  As I stood there, scanning the overhead signs for a clue, another shopper sighed beside me and said, “I can’t find my thing either.”  “What are you looking for?” I asked.   “Potato starch, for me.” I added.  “You know, I think it might be down by the flour,” she said. So I wandered down that aisle, scanning the shelves.  I found potato flour, I found cornstarch—but no potato starch. For a moment, I debated buying the potato flour instead, but a quick Google search told me it wasn’t the same thing. I settled on cornstarch and made my way to the checkout line.  All along the way, people had been helping me look. Shoppers, strangers, all chiming in with ideas and encouragement. None of us had found it, but there was this shared sense of determination, a collective effort in something as small as tracking down an ingr...

I had reason recently to contemplate generosity. While we often think about generosity in gift giving, or tipping, there are many other ways to show generosity. Generosity in spirit or word isn’t spoken about much, but is so important in our interactions. Giving abundantly invites us to draw deeply upon knowing that our lives are plentiful. Within each of us, there is an unlimited supply of love and compassion. It is from this abundant heart space that generosity flows from. Consider this story told by Thich Nhat Hahn: There is a kind of vegetable in Vietnam called he (pronounced “hey”). It belongs to the onion family and looks like a scallion, and it is very good in soup. The more you cut the he plants at the base, the more they grow. If you don’t cut them they won’t grow very much. But if you cut them often, right at the base of the stalk, they grow bigger and bigger. This is also true of the practice of generosity. If you give and continue to give, you become richer and richer all t...