www.kaiser.net

Value

Potentiate Exceptional People. In all people there is a gap between potential and expression. Growth is the process of continually closing this gap. If this happens rapidly, a person can become their future self now. They can do and be things they would not otherwise for many years. This is the greatest gift an organization can give its high performers—and itself.

Grow people in place without promoting them to new organizational positions. Sometimes the most exceptional people in the organization are perfectly placed—right where they are. Promoting them to a higher-level position removes them from where they are most effective and adds significant cost. Intelligent organizations creatively honor their most valued employees.

Retain your superstars. Organizations acknowledge their top people through recognition and compensation. But superstars often leave organizations not because of a lack of recognition of what they have done, but a lack of opportunity for who they can become.

Rejuvenate. Our most potent people need the richest spaces for regeneration. Impactful leaders don't burn out because there is too much to do—they burn out for lack of spaces supporting their rejuvenation.

Create a Small Circle. Growth is not solely an individual pursuit. This is the reason why small circles are core to innovation and development. By being with people who are extraordinary, we become more extraordinary ourselves. What happens in the Alembic is not solely a matter of content, but being with other remarkable people. It would be unusual to find this concentration in a single organization.

Induce Gifts. Many of the gifts inherent in your most exceptional people are also inherent in many others. By developing and accentuating gifts in one person, similar gifts in others are much more likely to express. Excellence is contagious.

How it Works

Who Attends?
Each year the CEO chooses one exceptional leader from any part of the organization to attend the Alembic. This could be for succession, promotion, reward, or growth in place.

What is the structure?
The program consists of three onsites at different locations, distance learning, and personal coaching. Participants may begin with any onsite and conclude after three consecutive sessions.

When and Where?
June 12-15, 2011 in Ponte Vedra, Florida
September 18-21, 2011 in Santa Fe, New Mexico
February 2012 Dates TBD in Santa Fe, New Mexico

CEO Retreat
Each year, we honor our small circle of sponsoring CEOs with a special retreat. It is a mixture of fun, inspiration, personal development, and breakthrough thinking. Location & Dates TBD

Organizational Commitment
Organizations come with the intention to participate in the Alembic over multiple years. Although an organization may discontinue at any time, benefit both to the organization and the circle grows with ongoing involvement. Continuous investment brings continuous return.

CEO Founders Circle
The CEO Founders Circle is the initial group of CEOs in the Alembic. They are recognized as founders—and this recognition accompanies them across organizations.

Introduction to the Elements

The 13 elements described on the following pages are basic alchemical processes available to leaders. They permit the transformation of people and organizations. The elements are practical strategies tested throughout the ages in the crucible of real-world experience.
 

13 Elements

1: PERCEIVING - developing expanded sensory capacities, intuiting, looking ahead in time

The Element: You cannot act on what you cannot perceive. Expanded perception gives you the ability to more fully understand what is really happening in a situation—which may not be as it appears on the surface. As you perceive more, you have more alternative actions available. You can also sense the developmental trajectory of a person or organization. This enables you to help it move into a future form.

Why it matters: Most of what exists in organizations lies beyond the ability of managers to perceive it. Therefore they cannot respond.

2: RESONATING - passing to the standpoint of the other, matching vibration, understanding adversaries and allies, spanning

The Element: You naturally exchange information and energy with any person with whom you have resonance. And with greater resonance comes greater capacity for relationship. Your ability to match another person sets the threshold for your depth of interactions with them. If you can match them, you can understand them. If you do this so fully that you see as they see and feel as they feel, it is called passing over to the standpoint of the other.

Why it matters: Most of the conflict between people comes because of lack of understanding. Leaders who resonate with others can work with a wider scope of people and are more influential.

3: PURIFYING - de-conditioning, removing nonessential or residual elements, releasing what no longer serves you

The Element: Un-learning is often more important than learning. It is frequently not what a person or organization does not know that prevents forward progression, but what they think they know and refuse to release. This is the limitation of much executive education which simply pours more knowledge into someone's head. Purification is a process of releasing and clearing what must be subtracted for movement to take place.

Why it matters: Many people and organizations are so encumbered with emotional baggage and calcified mental models that there is no space for something new to take root.

4: STAGING - using space to create effects in people, designing habitats, creating inductive spaces, exploring power places

The Element: Spaces allow some things to happen and disallow others. What can't happen in your organization may be able to happen somewhere else. You can wait until the right space comes along to support what you wish to create, or you can use alchemy to shift the existing space.

Why it matters: Often leaders make a site visit, see an innovation, and come back to try and reproduce it. But the existing organizational space is not an adequate vessel. So even though all of the pieces and processes of the innovation are perfectly reproduced, it does not take root and flourish.

5: CONCENTRATING - speaking powerfully, holding a room, building energy, overcoming resistance, mobilizing internal force

The Element: Mastery comes through internal discipline. Real discipline is not something imposed from the outside in the form of a rigid rule—it is an internal rigor of reducing some things so that others can increase. Many higher abilities are only accessible if you are able to first consolidate your energies, then grow and focus them.

Why it matters: The attention of leaders is often divided in so many ways they can't generate the concentrated force necessary to precipitate major movement. So they are unable to overcome the inertia of the status quo.

6: ENERGIZING - intensifying or mitigating energies in a group, increasing vitality, motivating by your presence, radiating specific energies

The Element: If the energy inside a person or organization is lower than external forces, change is difficult. Often the most essential thing a leader does is infuse enough awareness and energy into a situation that it can shift. This requires great personal vitality as well as the ability to concentrate force. Leaders who are able to read and radiate specific energies can create effects not possible by simply manipulating denser parts of the organization—its structures and systems.

Why it matters: What you accomplish is a matter of who you are as well as what you do.

7: CONNECTING - building alliances, mobilizing community, synthesizing, multiplying resources

The Element: We live in a relational universe with total interconnectivity. Because we are conscious of only a small fraction of these connections, many of the allies and resources that could support our efforts go unrecognized. Often our most promising projects fail because of this. Alchemy is symbolic of a greater way you generate almost anything from very little by creating flow from one thing to another.

Why it matters: No one thrives alone. In the future, leadership moves from internal operations to external interfaces and connections.

8: FUSING - discovering interstices, seeking novel and disorienting experiences, integrating polarities

The Element: When there are tremendous polarities and differences, there is potential for great power. Sometimes in organizations the opposing forces are either not well defined or are resolved too quickly in an attempt to reduce stress. But this simultaneously reduces the potential for creative breakthroughs. Alchemical managers learn to hold just the right amount of tension between things that are very different. They seek out and cultivate opposites and allow them to swirl together and ultimately merge in new integrations.

Why it matters: Innovation occurs on the interface between one thing and another.

9: PUTRIFYING - allowing optimal breakdown, destroying an old matrix, sensing timing, harnessing chaos

The Element: Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. Without breakdown and difficulty there can be no breakthrough. If you introduce a solution before its optimal time, it will fail. People resist what they are not yet desperate enough to accept, and a premature solution becomes part of the problem. Alchemical managers allow some situations to deteriorate and may even accelerate a crisis in order to resolve it.

Why it matters: This is a time of high turbulence and accelerated breakdown. It is essential to know how to use chaos in the service of creation.

10: INCUBATING - seizing the moment, creating initial conditions, nurturing the new, shielding

The Element: Many ideas die because leaders don't understand the process of incubation. The bud never becomes the blossom for lack of right nurturance. Alchemical managers know how to create the initial conditions and ongoing support for things to take hold and flourish. They understand how to protect what is emerging from destructive forces and add necessary reinforcements.

Why it matters: Organizations don't fail for lack of good ideas—they fail because they can't bring them into form.

11: DENSIFYING - giving ideas adequate form, creating pathways of descent, understanding involution

The Element: When you form an idea and then build the thing you imagine, you densify it. Densification is a process of adding weight or material structure to a thing. It is what allows a possibility to become reality in the third dimension. This requires a keen sense of how things work in the world and how to create a form that can survive political and other forces. Alchemical leaders first see the patterns of possibility and then bring them into places that are more material.

Why it matters: Good ideas with inadequate density evaporate.

12: PRECIPITATING - assembling needed elements, supplying the missing factor, manifesting

The Element: Often what keeps a thing from happening is the absence of one essential element—everything else exists. When all the elements are available, precipitation occurs. A new form takes shape easily and immediately. Alchemical leaders understand that sometimes just one thing enables everything else to come into creative combination. They create results with ease by adding something small which makes all the difference.

Why it matters: Anything can happen anywere when the conditions are right.

13: SYMBOLIZING - creating enabling myths and stories, performing symbolic magic, seeing the meaning behind events

The Element: In alchemy, symbolizing is a way of making the invisible visible. The symbol holds all of the essential qualities of the thing it represents, so learning to synthesize symbols in new ways is learning to synthesize things in new ways. Creating a symbol for something provides the power to manipulate it.

Why it matters: It is symbolic meaning that determines how people in an organization respond to an event, not the event itself.