Last week I talked with a friend who was the first woman partner at her firm, led a litigation practice group, and is one of the most talented people I know. One of the many topics we discussed over coffee at a local Starbuck's was Appreciative Inquiry (AI). (Tal D. Ben-Shahar, in his lectures on the psychology of leadership linked to from my last post below, discusses AI beginning in lecture 6.)
My friend recalled hearing a lecture about AI by Dr. David Cooperrider (founder of AI) at a conference. Of all the academic presentations she heard during those three days, his was the most memorable. She said he was plain-spoken and impressive -- so impressive that she returned home and told many people about AI.
I have been interested in its many applications for several years now and have seen the significant effect it can have on conflict in the various processes of alternative dispute resolution. So I was excited to hear about a new book on an aligned topic, Appreciative Intelligence. As soon as I learned of the book, I asked its co-author Carol Metzker to be interviewed for idealawg; I will be posting that interview in the next few days.
Cooperrider wrote the Introduction to this new book. He includes the description of a talk he recently gave in which he proposed that peace would come from the world of business. The talk was given in Israel. He goes on to tell a remarkable story.
After the talk a stranger came up to me. He said: “I’d like to invite you to meet me at my helicopter tomorrow morning at 8:00”. I want you to see this thesis in action—“business as a force for peace”. He went on: “it’s a story of human imagination and the capacity to make something from nothing except hard work”. Indeed we would fly in the morning to the Galilee region, across the desert to an area without any natural resources. It is called Tefen, and later I discovered that this unassuming man was perhaps the wealthiest person in Israel; his worth was estimated to be over four billion dollars and what he has created now accounts for over 10% of Israel’s export GNP. His name is Stef Wertheimer. And for what he has accomplished, he honestly deserves to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Read the Introduction to see what Stef Wertheimer is doing.
Appreciative Inquiry and Appreciative Intelligence can turn your thoughts upside down; upside down thoughts are frequently valuable and change-promoting. Once you read Cooperrider's ideas in the Introduction and then read the upcoming interview of Metzker, I think you may agree with me that perhaps the most crucial, beneficial and needed question we can be asking today is: What is right with the legal profession?
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