ManagingWithAloha.com welcomes the “Dawning of a New Day”

Aloha to all of you in 2007 my Managing with Aloha Community!

I am honored you are here to share this dawning of a new day with me, and with all who have chosen to participate in our mission to manage and lead with dignity and nobility.

In late November we celebrated our two-year anniversary of the publishing of Managing with Aloha, and our childhood of the MWA movement would be called the “Tremendous Twos!” The book is in its’ third printing, and more importantly, we continue to welcome many more managers who will excitedly proclaim, “I am learning to manage and lead with aloha!”  Managers matter, and you can make a significant difference in the world of work.

Our value for the month of January is Ka lā hiki ola “the dawning of a new day,” and it could not be more fitting for this, our 2007 chapter as we imua, and go forward. Your subscriptions to www.managingwithaloha.com have skyrocketed, and I am exceptionally grateful of your intentions, help and commitment, for I freely admit (with not a little embarrassment) that while residing on a blogging platform this site has not been updated all that frequently up to now. This year that will change.

Therefore, for both old and new subscribers alike, here are my intentions, i.e. my MWA Ho‘ohana for 2007:

• This site, the home of Managing with Aloha will evolve to be THE continued reading guide for the MWA book, and to provide you with on-going coaching within your own MWA practice.

• I realize that many of you also read Talking Story, the blog I write which has become home to the Ho‘ohana Community. A Ho‘ohana essay on our MWA value of the month will continue to appear there on the first working day of each month, and after it is posted, I’ll provide a link for you here too.

• However Talking Story does weave into some other Community pursuits as well, and so going forward, it will be here on www.managingwithaloha.com that I will specifically write more extensively and cohesively on the MWA values and MWA coaching philosophy for you. As I do so, you will see that each of my 19 value pages here will get added to with article links so they are more comprehensive resources for you (If you are reading this via an RSS aggregator, click in to see the Hawaiian values index in the left sidebar). Take a quick look at Aloha as an example.
  

• To help our malihini, our newcomers, each month I will update the Book Excerpt link in the right sidebar with the MWA chapter corresponding to the value we are working on. That way, brand new subscribers can quickly get into step with us before purchasing their own copy of the book.

Reminder: Once you have your book, you have two choices. You can check out the MWA Jumpstart in our archives for our free, self-paced coaching program, or you can continue to work in step with the rest of the community and my recent postings.

• More subtle on Talking Story have been annual themes which cover some of the underlying Key Concepts of Managing with Aloha. For example, in 2005 our theme was The Reinvention of the Business Community, and in 2006 it was Our Language of Intention. My theme for 2007 is Sense of Place, and my writing on this Key Concept will shift here to www.managingwithaloha.com – stay tuned!

Now to the best part – your part!

I need your continued help. Help me inspire other managers and leaders with your stories; show them that they can do this just as you have — and as you continue to do. Management can be both simple and complex; it is a situational art, and the world is changing constantly, throwing new curveballs at us almost daily. Great managers are lifelong learners who are catching those balls and thrilling to the challenge of the game, adapting and growing constantly in the new plays they design.

I would like to publish your stories here, for in this global sea of change what is most striking is how universal our challenges and how much we have in common. We all can learn from your lessons learned, your triumphs and aha! moments, and yes, even those times you stumbled. Be brave and share them! I’ll do the same thing, continuing to share more of the examples you’ve already read in my book. I still stumble a lot (to this day I think about that doozy on page 165 of MWA), for stumbling is part of the learning all managers and leaders do. However none of us need stumble alone, and frankly, doing so is a foolish approach when you have such support to draw from instead.

So please, send me your stories with your permission to publish them for everyone to learn from. (Pen names are fine for publishing). If you would like to be a guest author here at any time just let me know which email address to use, and a Typepad invitation will quickly wing its’ way to you!

Ka lā hiki ola; it is truly the dawning of a new day

Let’s draw from our spirit of Aloha, and make it the best one ever.

Managing with Aloha may have come into your consciousness as my book first, but it is the great manager’s practice always. Reading about it is just the beginning, for Aloha is about an intention to share the good within us.

We live our values each and every day; we don’t leave them at home in our closets like a change of clothes. On the contrary, they breathe and grow like our skin, and the rest of these fascinating bodies we walk, talk, work and sleep in. And remember:

“To manage with Aloha is to draw out the best performance of your own management practice from the values that are inherent in your nature and a match for the demands of your business. To be a great manager is to realize your success depends on the people you manage, and they are driven by their values just as much as you are.”

—From Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawaii’s Universal Values to the Art of Business.  Begin on page 10 for more.

We need you to be the Great Manager you instinctively feel it is your calling to be. Mahalo nui for being here with us.

2007, we are off and running!