Archive for the ‘Masters and Mentors’ Category

This month the Aikido world, and the world at large lost a great Master of the Way, Koichi Tohei. I wrote an article to Tohei Sensei, my teacher for many years, as a tribute to his life and teachings.

You can read the article online: The Passing of a Great Master: Koichi Tohei (1920~2011), or you can download it here in the format that it appeared in the Daily YOMIURI Newspaper on Monday  The Passing of a Great Master- Koichi Tohei (1920~2011).

In addition, my good friend Hugh Purser produced a poem in tribute to Tohei Sensei, incorporating my calligraphy in the background, the characters for kiistu, meaning Returning to the Source.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where were you on Friday, March 11 @2:46 pm?

If you were in Japan, this moment is one that you are likely to remember for the rest of your life. This is the moment when the largest earthquake on record, a 9 on the Richter scale, struck off the coast of Eastern Japan, unleashed massive devastation in the wake of the tsunami, and shook us to our foundations.

Everyone has a story to tell, and sadly many thousands did not live to tell their story. But every story is important, and will remain in our memories, where we were, what we were doing, who we were with, and what went through our minds and hearts at that moment.

Some preserved their stories on video, through Twitter messages,  whatever and however they could shout out about at that moment when the earth shook, no one having any idea of how long it would last, what to do, how it would end, or even a means to contact their loved ones.

What was I doing @2:46 on March 11? Oddly enough, I was in a Starbucks making a sketch, the Nanba Warrior which you see below. Nanba means the art of physical finesse, literally the art of improvising your way out of a trouble spot (ナンバ ＝ 難場 difficult place).

I don’t know what possessed me to make this particular sketch, just a doodle, an impression of a remarkable photograph taken by my French photographer friend David Michaud of Ohtani Sensei, a master of the sword whom we visited in Shikoku last year. That photo, which appears below, I was simply sketching from memory, for no reason in particular.

Now when I look at that drawing, and that photo, just 8 days after the earthquake, I am struck by how extraordinary a thing it was to have thought of this photo, and just finished this sketch, when the building and the whole world began shaking violently.

The Way of the Sword is about living in the moment, putting your entire body and spirit into a single act. This is extraordinarily difficult to do, as is cutting the makiwara, the tightly rolled and tightly woven wet mat of straw which in the photo seemed to provide no resistance to Otani Sensei’s sword.

I hadn’t even looked at this photo or drawing once during the past week, far too preoccupied with the aftermath of the situation. But in retrospect, I look at it and feel there were many lessons in that moment on how to live, the strength that we all need now to live on and be strong, not only for ourselves, but for the millions who have been badly shaken.

The Nanba Warrior is a Renaissance Samurai, and Japan needs that spirit now more than ever.

Thank you to everyone for this. We are not alone! 感動しました！

Life Lessons from Peter Drucker

Now available in both English and Japanese!

Peter F. Drucker (1909~2005) was one of the great thought leaders of our time, the man who early on coined the term knowledge worker, and is widely considered the father of modern management. http://budurl.com/556g

His writings are so profound that now, one hundred years after his birth, he has a huge global following of people who want to understand and implement his principles for living. While it is best to read Drucker in his own words, it is also difficult to know where to begin.

An excellent place to start would be Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, by Bruce Rosenstein. Find information, reviews, articles, endorsements, and a video of the author’s interview with Peter Drucker just seven months before Drucker’s passing, at http://www.brucerosenstein.com/book.html

Rosenstein portrays Drucker’s philosophy in a highly accessible way, combining the skills of a veteran journalist, with the respect of a dedicated disciple. Drucker remained relevant to the end of his life, and left a lasting legacy.

A theme running through the book is that of building a Total Life List, a way of making sure that you consider and attend to the most important ingredients of a meaningful life. The title of the book was inspired by words spoken in his interview, saying that people who are truly happy live in more than one world. They are multidimensional, not wholly dependent on one area of life, nor ignorant of the others.

The Chapter titles are tantalizing, and provide a blueprint for the life that Drucker himself exemplified, or as Frances Hesselbein says in the Foreword, the way to diversify our daily existence.

• Designing Your Total Life

• Developing Your Core Competencies

• Creating Your Future

• Exercising Your Generosity

• Teaching and Learning

• Conclusion: Launching Your Journey

• Suggested Readings to continue your journey.

Peter Drucker saw far into the future. He wrote in 1969 in The Age of Discontinuity, “Today the center is the knowledge worker, the man or woman who applies to productive work ideas, concepts, and information, rather than manual skills or brawn.” These words could have been written today.
He led an amazing and varied life, not just as thought leader in management, but even as a recognized expert on Japanese art. Drucker was walking and talking Life/Work Balance long before the term became popular. He even anticipated that having a life outside of work could be both a cushion against job stress, and also an asset in pursuing a creative career path.

In his book published in 1999, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, he emphasized that you need to know your values, strengths, where you fit, what you will contribute, how you will take responsibility for relationships, and plan for the second half of your life. His advice was not focused on the future, so much as how you live in the present.

Drucker emphasized making the most of your leisure time, and of becoming a master or at least an amateur expert at something outside of your work. His vision for a fulfilled life included exercise, time for reading and thinking, teaching and learning, community involvement, time to create a legacy.

A man who lived a full life of nearly 100 years, telling us that we need to reinvent ourselves as we get older, and not just seek new supplies of energy. This is a man worth listening to. And the legacy he created makes this possible.

In addition to his many books, the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University carries on the Drucker legacy. http://www.druckerinstitute.com
There are Drucker Societies on 6 continents, as well as a Drucker Society in Tokyo at http://drucker-ws.org

But the best place to begin is with Rosenstein’s book, which will inspire and transform your life through the wisdom of one of the great leaders of our time.

William Reed

Download Life Lessons from Peter Drucker in PDF form.

Guy Kawasaki shows us the Art of the Evangelist

Guy Kawasaki needs no introduction, but for those who may not be up to date on the magic, Guy is a co-founder of the premium online magazine rack and blog resource Alltop.com, previously the chief evangelist for Apple, and the author of ten books, including the just released ENCHANTMENT: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.

To see who else is enchanted, read the comments by a lineup of luminaries on the Enchantment Facebook Page

Buy the book on Amazon or Kindle.

This infographic gives you a quick tour!

NHK Global Radio Sunday Mar 6, 2011 at 17:00

I was interviewed in Japanese on NHK Global Radio’s Program, I Love Japan, broadcast nationally and around the world.

You can listen to the broadcast online this week from Sunday, March 6.
My interview is toward the end of the one hour broadcast.

• How bullying led to my coming to Japan
• My first encounter with and choice of Aikido as a life path
• What is Nanba movement, and why is it beneficial to us today?

今週だけ！番組が聞けます！

うえのスリーンショットに書いてあるようにリンクをクリックしてください。

http://www.nhk.or.jp/gr/

http://www.nhk.or.jp/gr/radio.html

３月６日の５時台

一時間の「アイラブジャパン」という番組の後半の方に１０分程インタービューに出ています！

• 合氣道と出会ったきっかけは、いじめだった！
• 武道と日常生活
  
• ナンバ的動きとはどういうものか

NHKのキャスター後藤さん、大輪さん、スタッフの皆さん、ありがとうございます！

Radio is Back Bigtime!

You would assume with all of the multimedia and visually rich media available today, and with people preferring on-demand instant access to programming anytime from any place, that real time broadcast radio would be a relic of the past, or at least the only thing available for commuters stuck in traffic.

However, as most radio stations have websites, in the past few years radio broadcasting has discovered Social Media and all kinds of ways to add new dimensions of accessibility and mobility to its programming.

The best way is to explore this is to access your favorite radio program online and see what they offer. But don’t stop there, for there is a whole universe of options in net radio, giving you access to any genre available in the world, either free with advertising, or without advertising if you are willing to pay a modest subscription fee.

There are simply too many options available to do it justice in a blog post, but here are a few fun places to explore.

Live365 Internet Radio

http://www.live365.com/index.live

Free if you are willing to put up with frequent and deliberately annoying interruptive commercials, but blissfully agreeable once you pay the modest subscription fee, and gain access 24/7 to all of the genres shown below, and many local radio stations around the world. My favorite station is Cool Jazz. You can also purchase music from iTunes, and in the subscription version, you get access to information on the albums as well. Wonderful!

Tokyo FM Timeline

Tokyo FM is currently running a series featuring journalists who are commenting on the potential for Facebook and Twitter to be wildly successful, or to run aground in Japan. If you speak Japanese, well worth tuning in! And you can comment on Twitter through the #tags.

http://www.tfm.co.jp/timeline/index.html

Do a Google Search on Internet Radio and you will find millions of results!

オンラインで予約

詳細、写真、参加者の声はこちらへ、SAMURAI WALK

「ナンバ歩き」の秘訣が身に付きます！SAMURAI WALKのワークショップwithウィリアム・リード、２月２２日１８：００〜２０：００＠清澄庭園。３０００円で要予約。仕事や私生活に活かす！詳細は、http://ping.fm/81QnM

Latest Twitter Post:

The MandalaChart for iPad App now Free! http://ping.fm/NTFx9 On iTunes: http://budurl.com/8c7a

On Sunday Feb 6, I attended again the 7th All Japan Memory Championships in Nara, both as a Judge and a speaker.

The Memory Championships are an amazing phenomena to see, with contestants competing against the clock to memorize a shuffled pack of cards, or 99 names and faces, random sequences of numbers, words, or phrases, all in the space of 5 or 10 minutes per challenge.

The Memory Championships are held each February in Yamato Koriyama City, a small Castle Town in Nara Prefecture, celebrating the birthplace of Hieda no Are 1300 years ago. Hieda no Are had an impeccable memory, being able to recite any text of any length on hearing or reading it just once. Working under the Emperor Tenmu, in 712 Hieda no Are was commissioned to compile a formal version of the Kojiki, the Record of Ancient Matters, which is the oldest chronicle in Japan, and details the mythology and stories surrounding the creation of the Japanese islands and the gods of Shinto tradition.

Hieda no Are is to Japan, what the blind poet Homer was to Greece, who chronicled from memory and for all posterity the many wonderful stories of Greek Mythology in the Illiad and the Odyssey.

The event is sponsored by the Yamato Koriyama City Government, and is covered by local media and Kansai television. Participants range from small children to elderly contestants, and one after another they perform feats of memory under pressure that seem like pure magic.

The Memory competition runs for the better part of the day, and I was asked to give a short message to all of the participants and spectators at the end of the competition. This is the essence of what I told them.

After the contestants spend an intense 5 or 10 minutes memorizing an extremely challenging set of random sequences of numbers or words, they are given again about that much time to reproduce them in the exact same sequence. As the answers are written out in pencil, the room grows serenely quiet with the sound of pencils rapidly jotting out the answers with remarkable accuracy. The sound is hypnotic, like the patter of gentle rainfall. I told them that when I first came to Japan in 1972 as an exchange student, I was quite taken with the small sounds around me, which in wooden Japanese houses became magically multiplied. You could hear every nuance of changes in the wind, passing sounds in the street, and the birds and insects of the season. I said that some 40 years later today in Tokyo many of these small sounds have vanished behind concrete walls, or with massive urbanization, and that the small sounds you are more likely to hear today might be the tinny beats leaking from the earphones of a young person plugged into his or her own world on the train. The poetry is gone. However, as I heard the sound of pattering pencils, I felt as if I were listening to the sounds of the flow of thoughts like rain, a very pleasant experience, and quite remarkable considering the high level of their memory skills. For me, it was a vintage Japan experience, and one that you seldom get to experience today.

They loved the message, and it still sticks with me. You might wonder why anyone would want to spend time memorizing random bits of information with no useful purpose other than being in the competition. Actually, it goes far beyond that.

The contestants are not memorizing as you might think. They are associating sounds and images with incredible fluency, converting what is mere abstract information to the rest of us into a vivid and memorable story or sequence of rich associated imagery, which they are then able to easily remember and access to convert back into the sequence of shuffled cards, the names and faces, the random sequences of numbers or words or phrases. They are practicing imagination at a world class level, and it is a remarkable thing to be a part of.

Here are some photos of the venue, as well as some of my notes and impressions taken during the event in my Idea Marathon Notebook.