Welcome to the latest incarnation of my business website! Over the years my site has had a variety of looks but this is my favorite so far and I am excited and proud to share it with the world.

The header photo on the home page is the Mississippi River viewed from downtown Baton Rouge. The photo in this post is the river in New Orleans. Most of my life has been spent close to rivers. Our home in Baton Rouge is two miles from and our New Orleans condo is two-thousand feet from the mighty Mississippi. I love to be near a river, maybe because it’s such a metaphor for change, growth, and work.

Martha Beck explains it eloquently – “rivers exemplify the change that fills our lives. Every molecule of water moves continuously; its relationship to other molecules, to objects in the river, to the land it passes is always changing. You can stare at a spot on the river all day and never see anything stable. That’s why rivers are fresh and alive, rather than stagnant and stale. Though everything in the river passes away, the river itself remains constant, and it is constantly beautiful.”

Think about the work of managers and leaders – problems faced early in a career are usually very different from challenges down the road. Or the evolution of any career – during which the individual is both the same person they’ve always been but constantly changing.

Interesting river tidbit: when entering the Mississippi River system from the gulf, oceangoing ships are required to take a pilot on board. River pilots guide ships from the Gulf of Mexico into the mouth of the Mississippi and upriver to New Orleans and Baton Rouge. A few years back on a cruise, near the mouth of the river, we watched a pilot boat pull alongside our ship and the pilot jumped from the boat into an open door in the side the ship – a tricky maneuver indeed. It is an exclusive and fascinating profession and necessary because of the always changing features of the mighty Mississippi.

Is your career or work as a leader any less complex than the river? What I do is provide individuals and organizations with tools and support to diagnose, analyze, and deal with change through growth. Because in the world of work, change is the constant.