AC_1965_Web

21 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z B R O W N der age of 29, that life took a very new turn.The “clínica” hired a con- sultant, Gail Silverman, one of the early women of the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Sciences.Gail was applying Douglas McGregor’s Theory Y humanistic manage- ment ideas to her work with our staff. McGregor was a former pres- ident of Antioch, so things once again came full circle as I was of- fered scholarships to NTL to learn about this newfangled field called Organization Development. Edie Seashore (Antioch 1950), another early NTL woman pioneer, became a dear older woman mentor and friend...an additional Antioch thread woven into the tapestry of my life and work.My life has taken such ser- endipitous turns. One of the corpo- rate executives I met at NTL who was in charge of the Latin America region for TRW Systems saw that I knew how to bring people together around common goals and spoke fluent Spanish (thank you Antioch!). Thus, even though I knew nothing about corporations (my father was a carpenter who I never saw in long pants) I began a 30-year period of going back and forth to work pri- marily with corporate executives in Latin America and then with their parent companies in the U.S....who could have imagined! In the early 1990s, as my cor- porate consulting practice was get- ting off the ground, I was asked by Peter Senge to serve as a member of the core research team of the MIT Dialogue Project at the Sloan School of Management. It was during that period that what came to be called the World Café approach to strate- gic dialogue and community build- ing was born in our living room at an interdisciplinary dialogue of Intellectual Capital Pioneers. Our experience with the 24 global participants, people in our liv- ing room for that first dialogue, led to experimentation around the world, a Ph.D. focused on the power of di- alogue and collective intelligence, and a book, The World Café: Shaping our Futures Through Conversations that Matter , now translated into 13 lan- guages, most recently released in mainland China. We’ve been amazed that hun- dreds of thousands of people on six continents have used the World Café process to enable democratic voice and choice across race and class, workers and management, el- ders and youngers, as well as corpo- rate and nonprofit entitles—bring- ing a diversity of perspectives and “conversations that matter” into the forefront of making progress on complex organizational and societal issues. Again, who could have imag- ined! For stories on the World Café and its work around the globe, go to www.theworldcafe.com or www. theworldcafecommunity.org Juanita and thoroughly Modern Momma Millie. The World Café—an overview!