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We live in a world that is saturated with leadership wisdomfrom countless books to endless streams of think piecesyet the gap between what leaders know and what they do is as wide as ever. The thing is, leadership transformation is hard. It takes courage to step outside the status quo. And its deeply human to cling to comfort and choose habit over risk. In our years of working with leaders, weve noticed those who succeed at continuously evolving their leadership mettle strike a balance between three impulses. To make the concept easier to grasp, we visualize each impulse as a persona: the Kid, the Scientist, and the Gardener. These personas act as a framework to not just learn but to maintain momentum in ones personal leadership development journey. Heres how: 1. The kid persona cultivates curiosity, play, and bold action Picture a child encountering the world: Everything is new and fair game to touch, break, or build. Kids arent afraid of failure; they learn by doing, adjusting, and doing again. Leaders often limit their learning by the perceived parameters they operate in. But by embracing the Kid persona, leaders can tap into a playful curiosity and willingness to act without having every answer tied up in a bow. Leaders too often succumb to analysis paralysis, fearful of imperfection, criticism, or worse, failure. But kids movethey try and they try again. An executive director we coached, for example, felt that bureaucracy hampered her teams creative problem-solving. In response, she gathered the team and they spent a day clarifying their objectives and creatively brainstorming the systems they needed to “break” so they could rebuild them more effectively. She saw immediate results. They created an efficient process for getting things done, with less bureaucratic friction. This resulted in higher accountability and reduced frustration among the team. Sometimes, leaders need to be bold enough to dismantle what isnt working so they can rebuild something even better. To be the Kid, leaders need to cultivate the courage to play with new ideas, even when the stakes feel high. This doesnt mean reckless gambles; it means small, bold experiments, knowing that not every attempt will succeedand that thats okay. Try a new meeting format. Give frontline staff decision-making autonomy for a day. Stop asking, What if I fail? and start saying, Lets see what happens. 2. The scientist encourages rigorous observation and iteration Being curious alone isnt enough. Enter the Scientist, who follows up playful experiments with data collection, keen observation, and a commitment to learning. The Scientist is the counterweight to rash impulsiveness and unintelligent failure. After a leadership team tried out a new decision-making framework, one executive we worked with assumed it had gone well because it resulted in shorter meetings. But a scientific enquiry revealed another story. Surveys and structured feedback highlighted that many team members felt sidelined or pressured to agree quickly. This, in turn, meant that decisions only represented the opinions of a few. With data in hand, this leader iterated: He refined the process and incorporated structured time for dissent and debate. The changes stuck precisely because they evolved through cycles of learning. Adopting the Scientist persona means seeking feedback, reflecting honestly on outcomes, and iterating deliberately. This might include gathering 360-degree reviews, analyzing team performance metrics, or simply pausing to ask, What worked, and what didnt? This feedback doesnt need to be external. The Kid might challenge a leader to play around with different ways of communicating during meetings (speaking first or speaking last, only asking questions, or only summarizing). In addition to observing the impact this has on the team, the smart Scientist looks inward as well, by asking questions like, How does it feel when I behave in X ways? The Scientist is ultimately concerned with hypothesis-testing and has a willingness to put personal agenda to the side. This also requires a healthy degree of self-reflection. The Scientist embodies humility and recognizes that great leaders are lifelong learners who improve through careful study and thoughtful change. 3. The gardener nurtures growth and prunes what no longer serves After exploration and evidence-based reflection comes cultivation. The Gardener persona turns inward, focusing on nurturing their own growth and weeding out behaviors, habits, and beliefs that hinder one’s leadership potential. This self-cultivation ensures that change isnt superficial, but deeply rooted in ongoing personal transformation. This involves nurturing strengths such as empathy, communication, or resilience. And just as importantly, the Gardener identifies and removes the weedspatterns of behavior such as micromanagement, defensiveness, or self-doubtthat choke progress. One executive we coached struggled with the need to control every decision. By embracing the Scientist and the Kid, he first noticed that something was off with his team and started experimenting with alternative approaches to delegation. But its only by embodying the Gardener could he truly acknowledge that the problem was his tendency to micromanage. In response, he began intentional delegation to team members, which not only reduced the reliance on him, but boosted the volume of quality ideas by tapping into the talent around him. Over time, this fostered team engagement by cultivating shared ownership of the companys success and growth. The Gardener is patient but deliberate. Growth within oneself requires consistent effort, care, and self-reflection. Leadership doesnt thrive on autopilot. It demands regular, conscious tending. It requires the commitment to nurture what helps you grow and to release what holds you back. In adopting the Gardener persona, leaders take radical responsibility for their own transformation, recognizing that true leadership growth starts within themselves. By doing so, they become not only better leaders for others, but more authentic versions of themselves. Blending personas for transformational change No single persona transforms leadership alone; the magic lies in their synergy. Leaders who play like Kids, analyze like Scientists, and nurture themselves like Gardeners develop practices that endure. They embody curiosity, rigor, and carea powerful combination that creates space for nuance and brings abstract leadership wisdom to life. True transformation doesnt happen in a vacuum or through a single aha moment. It unfolds in iterative, intentional cycles of bold action, reflection, and cultivationits a continuous evolution. When leaders embrace these personas, change is not just an aspirationit becomes a living practice that inspires othrs to grow alongside them. So, put on your explorers cap, pick up the magnifying glass, and tend your internal garden. Tomorrows leaders will thrive not just by knowing, but by continually growing.
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E-Commerce
Now this is a Lego set suitable for framing. Soon Lego will release an artful 2,615-piece set based on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which has the original work in its permanent collection. Theres no oil paint required for this rendition, though: The Lego set has enough blocks to make 16 sunflowers with adjustable petals, plus a tile with Van Goghs signature and a removable frame. The set is currently available for preorder for $199.99 and will ship starting March 1. Lego’s Amsterdam store and the Van Gogh Museum will permanently display sets of their own beginning March 1 as well. [Photo: Lego] Working with the museum helped Lego designers delve into the details of the 1889 painting, according to designer Stijn Oom. One of the greatest challenges they faced was re-creating the “impasto effect,” wherein Van Gogh heavily layered on paint. Indeed, the Lego version pops in 3D. “We are incredibly proud of the result and hope our fans enjoy building it as much as we enjoyed bringing Van Goghs masterpiece to life,” Oom said. Lego partnered with the museum for a podcast episode that will be available in March about Van Gogh and the creation of the Lego “Sunflowers” set, so builders can learn about the painting’s history while assembling the piece brick by brick. [Photo: Lego] “We hope this Lego set will inspire and engage new audiences with the art and life story of Vincent van Gogh,” Rob Groot, the museum’s managing director, said in a statement. The set is Lego’s latest foray into the world of art history. Last year, the toy maker turned Van Gogh’s Starry Night into a 2,316-piece set, and it’s also made sets of Art Hokusais The Great Wave, Leonardo da Vincis Mona Lisa, and Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture, as well a detailed re-creation of the Notre Dame Cathedral. In recent years Lego has leaned into more complexand priceytoys and sets aimed at adults, including collections based on outside intellectual property, like Marvel and Star Wars, to grow its customer base and bottom line. Legos aren’t just for kids’ toy bins anymore. You can literally hang them on your walls.
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E-Commerce
When I recently needed to find a last-minute place to stay for a week in Palo Alto, I picked one of the cheapest options on Airbnb: a 13-by-13 foot tiny house. Inside, the main living area was smaller than a parking space. Still, it had room for everything you might find in a typical studio apartment. Along the back, a tiny loveseat disguised a Murphy bed that could be pulled down from the wall; the coffee table was exactly the right size to move to the opposite side of the room when it was time to use the bed. On the other side of the house, there was a minuscule kitchen with a tiny fridge, a two-burner stove, and a sink, next to a semi-normal-sized bathroom with a shower. [Photo: courtesy Kithaus] The home is the smallest ADU, or backyard house, made by a prefab company called KitHAUS. (The company also makes even smaller units, without kitchens or bathrooms, that can be used as home offices or art studios.) The size makes it more likely to be used as a guest house. But its also one example of an ADU that could be built relatively quickly and affordably to help tackle the housing crisisincluding in L.A., where the city needed hundreds of thousands of new units even before the fires destroyed thousands of homes. The 169-square-foot version of the house starts at only $80,000, and can be built in around a week. Adding a foundation and doing the other prep work needed to install the prefab building adds another 15% to the cost. In total, the size makes it less expensive than building a typical ADU. View this post on Instagram A post shared by kitHAUS (@kithaus) The company also makes larger (and pricier) versions with one or two bedrooms. In L.A., they could be used in two ways. It could be a temporary spacein the Palisades, if someones going to rebuild their home, we may be able to have a prefab building like a KitHAUS in the burn areas, says Tom Sandonato, cofounder of the company. The units are made from aluminum and other fire-rated materials, which makes them safer in a wildfire, though not completely fireproof; some ADUs that the company previously built in Altadena and Pacific Palisades were lost in the recent fires. Like other ADUs, the designs can also be used to quickly add new backyard units in cities like L.A. that dont have enough apartment buildings. [Photo: courtesy Kithaus] The version that I stayed in was a tight squeeze. But that was partly because of the furniture and layout. The combination bed-sofa that the owner had chosen was difficult to wrangle: Since all of the cushions had to be removed from the sofa to pull down the bedand the bedding had to be taken off to fold the bed back onto the wall to unveil the sofaI didnt end up bothering to switch it back and forth. The bed took up most of the floor space. But as I perched on a tiny chair and surveyed the room, I could envision how different furniture could have made the space more functional; a regular bed would have worked better than a Murphy bed, for example, despite the fact that the Murphy bed was designed to save room. I was working remotely from the tiny cottage. But for someone who spends long hours at a job somewhere else and often goes out at night, its possible to imagine that 169 square feet could be enough space. At the property where I stayed, there was a a private patio that was larger than the tiny house itself. Thanks to the fact that Palo Altos weather is 70 degrees and sunny for much of the year, it was effectively an extra room. [Photo: courtesy Kithaus] L.A. has been trying to push residents to build more backyard houses for a decade, with help from state laws that loosened zoning restrictions. Last year, more than a third of the new houses built in L.A. County were ADUs. Current ADUs are already helping house some Angelenos who lost their homes in the fires. Now, Sandonato is hoping that the city will help streamline permitting more to make ADUs even easier to build. One of the KitHAUS designs, for example, could potentially be pre-permitted to speed up the process.
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E-Commerce
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