Online Kolloquium Nr. 90: Beyond Ego-Myopia™: How Leaders See, and Why They Can't See That

Date and time
Duration
2 hours
Location
Online via Zoom
Referent

Eric Kaufmann

Details

We do not see the world as it is. We see it as we need it to be – organized, often invisibly, around three drivers: the need to be right, the need to be liked, and the need to have might. Eric Kaufmann calls this ego-myopia. The trouble isn't that we have it; it's that it operates in the one place we can't look from: inside our own perception. You can't read the label from inside the jar.

This colloquium takes that problem seriously rather than solving it reductively. Kaufmann brings what twenty-five years in executive coaching has taught him about how ego-myopia distorts decisions, fractures teams, and throttles a system's intelligence – and about the wisdom, love, and power that become available as it loosens.

But the harder question is the one we'll sit in together: how does a self, or a system, develop the capacity to see its own organizing distortions while still inside them? What actually moves a person – or a team, or a polity – from inside the jar to reading the label?

Bring your own cases, your own frameworks, your own skepticism. This works best as a room thinking out loud.

Shortbio
Eric Kaufmann

Eric Kaufmann works at a seam most people keep separate: the contemplative life and the executive one. He has practiced meditation for forty years, including a year of silent retreat in a mountain cabin he built himself, trained in a Zen lineage running through Joko Beck and Ezra Bayda. He does not call himself Buddhist. He calls the path householder enlightenment – the claim that ordinary life, boardrooms included, can be the site of awakening rather than its obstacle. Where most paths ask you to rise above the world, his asks full engagement with this steep personal climb.

For twenty-five years he has tested that claim against its hardest terrain, advising leaders and executive teams at organizations like ASML and serving as Chairman of the Board at Dr. Bronner's. Out of that work came his inquiry into ego-myopia – the unconscious need to be right, liked, or in control that quietly organizes how all of us perceive, leaders most of all. His response is a leadership grounded in wisdom, love, and power: not ideals, but capacities that become available as the distortion loosens.

He founded the firm Sagatica, holds a Thought Leader seat at Harvard's Institute of Coaching, and is the author of Leadership Breakdown, The Four Virtues of a Leader, and Rooted, Rising & Relaxed.

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