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The Science & Art of Communication


Using AI to Help Us Reclaim Our Humanity! (?!?)
Here’s a picture of the Acropolis, which I took on my trip to Greece in 2016. It was a bit of a vision quest for me, seeking to harmonize my head and my heart. What I found was a crossroads between East and West, bringing together a fortress and religious sanctuary, a key economic hub and a center for civic and cultural expression. I’ve pretty much spent my whole life trying to navigate such a crossroads in my inner world, building a bridge from science to philosophy, and fro
Nov 22 min read


Generative Communication and Purposeful Play
That's me as a circus ringmaster getting caught for committing murder! An old WaPo article from 30 years ago! My father founded a bank and my mother was an artist. I am their son. Today, I'm a business professor. But, I'm also a classically-trained musician and actor, who panicked and went into finance for 25 years. The picture above shows one of my weirder efforts to try to make all that make sense! I have been trying to make sense of my business and creative sides for a lo
Oct 147 min read


The Power of Purposeful Play
Athena and Bob — Thanks ChatGPT! I've been trying to write a play about a guy named Bob going through a midlife crisis. He quits his job at a startup in Boston and goes on a vision quest, wandering toward New York City. As he does, he uses an AI Bot — AthenaLM — to explore the history of places along the way. At first, he’s humbled by all that Athena knows. But, he starts to realize it’s up to him to discover the meaning of his quest. Athena is great at finding facts; but he’
Sep 24 min read


Storytelling That Drives Change
Sunnyside in Tarrytown NY. The home of one of our greatest storytellers - Washington Irving At the NYU Stern School of business our...
Jul 15, 20243 min read


The Uses of Beauty — Putting the Arts to Work
A picture I took from a sidewalk in Greenwich Village NYC Nietzsche's quote here may sound like hyperbole, but I’d argue he didn’t go far...
Jul 7, 20243 min read


Arts + Health - How Working in the World Artfully Can Keep Us Well
My crooked photograph of my mother's beautiful work! Before we can be fully effective in our lives, we need to be grounded and well. Unfortunately, our society is suffering from an epidemic of anxiety, which is pervasive in many worlds, including business. But, business culture may be less tolerant of the open management of this challenge than other realms, compounding the problem. Arts have been a universal communal expression for thousands of years and, I would argue, part
Oct 22 min read


How Acting Can Help us Discover and Embody our Most Authentic Selves
Sir Lawrence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, playing a Nazi torturer and his victim in The Marathon Man (1976) What a horrific image! And,...
Sep 162 min read


The Art of Storytelling is the Heart of All the Arts
An image from an Arts & Health @ NYU event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021 On one level, it's obvious why storytelling is...
Sep 123 min read


The Evolution of Community and How Our Shared Stories Hold Us Together
"A dream you dream alone is only a dream; a dream you dream together is reality" - Yoko Ono ++ For thousands of years, humans have created communities to survive and thrive. And that effort has evolved as we created language and agriculture, commerce and global trade, and the technologies that helped drive them in the past and will help change them in the future. It is a story of the changing ways that we connect and communicate - from tribes in the jungles of Africa to the A
Sep 43 min read


Storytelling — The Foundational Art: How Stories Define Who I Am and Who We Are
That’s our dog Lexi and my partner Toni Taylor on the right ... and me! How do we tell our stories? During my careers, I've seen the...
Sep 43 min read


Bringing All of Our Humanity to Moments that Matter
This Japanese ideogram — Ima Kokoro — roughly translates as current heart/mind and captures the secret of successful connection, communication and collaboration with others. The upper character, Ima, is the roof-like peak, which signifies this present moment, the Now . Ironically, that’s the foundation of a trusting and effective relationship with others. There are many different practices that can help us become fully present, mindfulness, yoga, tai chi, just to name a few.
Jun 30, 20232 min read


Seeking Truth in the Ancient World that will Help Us in This One!
I traveled to Delphi in Greece in 2016. I first heard about it when I used the so-called Delphi Technique as a financial analyst thirty...
Jun 19, 20232 min read


Developing Your Aesthetic Intelligence
I learned to love music and philosophy, science and technology all at the very same time. A monolith appears pointing to the moons of Jupiter and the Sun, and what lays beyond. The opening chords of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra sound triumphantly. The orchestra swells and the timpani announce the beginning of a hero's journey. Our ego boundaries fall away and we become part of a cascade of light and sound toward a new life. And the underscoring for that journey w
Nov 17, 20224 min read


Leonardo Da Vinci on the Uses of Beauty
Leonardo was not just studying the anatomy of his subjects in order to paint or draw them accurately, he wanted to know how they...
Nov 17, 20221 min read


On Narrative Intelligence – Stories are Our Truths, So Tell Them Well
When I was a kid, you went to school to learn from the teacher and the books in the library. And although our world brings us a vast...
Nov 17, 20222 min read
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