Catalyzing the Conversation:
STRIVE TO THRIVE
In this issue of Catalyst we ask enterprise leaders, entrepreneurs and innovation catalysts
-“what drives your thrive?”
Issue 16 | Summer 2018
Dr. Mary McBride
Chair and Professor Creative Enterprise Leadership International Graduate Programs
Arts and Cultural Management and Design Management, Pratt School of Art
To be successful and shape futures, we must strive. Striving is an action verb describing a vigorous and persistent application of intention, ability and action to effect. Strivers achieve and accomplish and enable others to pursue and persist toward goals. Go strivers!
Organizations encourage striving because striving enables the achievement of established organizational goals. But striving can also tamp down creative energies, lead to unproductive struggle and generate intergroup conflict. The art of leadership is to encourage striving while enabling thriving-to generate prosperity and flourishing for the strivers as well as for the enterprise and its community of users. Striving without thriving is both joyless and dangerous.
The ability to encourage both striving and thriving is an essential leadership competency, but what does that competency look like in action?
We asked our Catalyst community to consider that question and to seek out leaders who embody and enable thriving. We found them everywhere-in education, in the arts, in design and community development. We offer you their insights and examples in this issue of Designing Thriving. You will find interviews, articles, examples and case studies. And, you will also see how we in Arts and Cultural Management and Design Management are driving our own thrive by applying our research to catalyze innovation in our communities.
We continue to thrive by continuing to learn together and from the world around us. This year we went to Ireland to explore how struggle and joy have emboldened people and enterprise to insist on cultural flourishing as well as cultural survival. And, the road rose up to meet us with a blizzard! Sure, but, how better to stir struggle and joy than on an emerald isle stunned with snow.
View our entire Catalyst | Designing Thriving Publication and share with your friends and network a favorite visionary’s article or an insight from this theme and our many other Catalyst: Leading Creative Enterprise themes.