We talk a lot about agility: Leadership agility, organizational agility, and innovation. Yet unless there is an understanding of how to detect the underlying beliefs of the cultural 'immune' system, progressive successes can fail to be integrated.

This month, Dawna speaks with Fred Simon, former project manager with the 1995 Ford Lincoln Continental project as they take a high level and in the trenches look at how this shows up in corporate life.

Fred worked for the Ford Motor Company for thirty years, and was a founding member of the Society for Organizational Learning. He has collaborated with Dr. Peter Senge and the late W.Edwards Deming.

Fred’s work in organizational learning is about developing more effective leadership, organizational alignment, empowerment and interdependency.

With increased stress in working environments combined with outside pressures to speed up performance, organizations have to reflect on this question in order to see where they are unintentionally blocking contribution. Anne Murray Allen is currently the Director for the Executive Development Center at Willamette University’s Atkinson Graduate School of Management. In this role Anne is responsible for developing non-degree certificate programs in business and public management essentials, sustainability, and industry-specific training. Her personal areas of interest and research are in understanding how healthy, performance-based organizations are built and sustained. These ‘social networks of collaboration’ are a key ingredient for organizations and communities to move into the future taking effective action in building a sustainable future.

Anne retired from Hewlett-Packard Company in 2005, having served in a variety of management and executive positions over a 16 year period. These included leading company-wide Knowledge and Intranet Management, strategic planning (at the division and at the corporate level), culture integration for the Compaq/HP merger, IT for the Imaging and Printing Group, production management for scanners and Inkjet cartridges. While still at HP, Anne co-authored an article with Dennis Sandow entitled, “The Nature of Social Collaboration” published in Reflections Journal, May 2005.

Anne’s social action research initiative while she worked in Hewlett Packard turned up some surprising results on what lies at the roots of phenomenal results and what you must embody as a leader to support their high functioning.

Sometimes metaphors offer a wonderful way to see ourselves and how teams function from a new perspective. Developing the ability to contribute to the sound of performance is further strengthened when it is connected to your personal ability to shift quickly from one point of view to another or to use conflict as a source of creative expansion.

Dawna talks to Dr. Brian Fraser, lead provocateur of JazzThink, a company which uses the workings and wisdom of jazz to provoke people to brilliant leadership and teamwork.

Prior to his 2002 launch as a speaker, facilitator, leadership coach, and seminar leader, he was the dean of the Presbyterian college at the University of British Columbia and taught leadership and organizational development at Vancouver School of Theology.

The rational mind sees itself as our safety referee. Stray too far away from known familiarity and it cries foul and reins us back in so we can stay within the comfort zone. However, as the complexity of global and organizational problems increases so must our comfort with a different kind of safety: the kind where you can explore possibilities, experiment with radically different approaches and work with others as part of a collaborative and diverse team. That takes innovative learning.

Jack Barnard, author, musician, speaking coach, performer, radio show broadcaster and founder of SourceWorks, which merges improvisation and theater techniques with personal growth and development speaks to us about how innovative learning can help us change our thinking so that we can get out of the perplexing conundrums that limit performance.

After all, the thinking that got us into the situation we are in is definitely not the kind of thinking that will get us out.

Have you ever walked into an office and instantly felt comfortable – or completely the opposite? That "vibe" is all about energy – or rather, your sensitivity to that energy.

The ways that energetic sensitivity affects corporate culture is the starting point for Dawna Jones' two-part discussion with Dr. Rollin McCraty from the the HeartMath Institute, whose research explores this intangible phenomenon.

All working relationships with customers and colleagues start with you and your energy. And sales staff, teams, managers, executives are unknowingly creating a measurable electro-magnetic field that can be registered not only around you but also with a collective ‘energetic blueprint’ that characterizes company culture.

In this first interview, Dawna explores how the mechanism works and how to make it work for you.

With companies cutting their creative talent to ‘survive’, the capacity and moment to shift to a higher level of leadership is being missed.

Companies who live by living asset stewardship and the principles of nature have cultures that understand and see themselves as part of a living system.

In this last of a series of interviews with Jay Bragdon, we look at South West Airlines culture as an example of an eco-risk company who has successfully organized themselves to be in alignment with stewardship in good times and in bad.

While their example can be seen as an effective strategy none of the adaptations required can be done superficially. Join Dawna Jones and Jay Bragdon as they discuss what it takes to forge collectively a future with hope.

There is nothing like a crisis with money to bring out the capacity of the individual or the company to adapt. So how well positioned are companies who organize themselves and manage themselves around a core value for Life to finance themselves in tough economic times?

In this third part of a four part interview with Jay Bragdon, author of Profit for Life, we explore this question along with why companies who manage by Living Asset Stewardship aren’t the ones running for bailouts; the benefits of seeing holistically when it comes to adapting to massive change and the signals that separate out a company ready to implode from one ready to grow through the crisis of the times.

What sector is catatonic right now and what is the global impact of their behavior? Join Dawna Jones and Jay Bragdon to find out.

In the second part of their discussion about Living Asset Stewardship, Dawna Jones and Jay Bragdon examine some examples of companies that do things differently and whose goals encompass more than a narrow focus on the bottom line.

As Jay explains, organisations that embrace the model of Living Asset Stewardship enjoy cultures that encourage learning and innovation – to the great benefit of all concerned.

Have we reached a point at which the total cost of industrial capitalism is outweighing its benefits? As the cost of bailing out the World's financial system reaches trillions of dollars, it is easy to argue that we have.

Even if you don't accept this, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the world needs a new way of doing business, one that redefines the basic purposes and responsibilities of corporations and looks at far more than just the bottom line as a measure of success or failure.

In the first in a series of podcasts, Dawna Jones talks to Jay Bragdon, an investment advisor for high net worth families, author of Profit for Life and an evangelist for a very different way of doing business.