What's in a Name?
Full fathom five thy father lies Of his bones are coral made Those are pearls that were his eyes Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange
-Ariel’s Song, The Tempest
When conjuring up a name for a blog, I reached back to Shakespeare whose words had been the inspiration over a decade ago for my company name, SeaChange Resources.
The opening words, "Full Fathom Five", certainly had an alliterative ring to it. I conducted some due-diligence Googling and discovered that many others had similarly taken a shine to that phrase and used all or part of it in their books, short stories, poems, songs, plays and movies, to name a few mediums. It was also the title of one of Jackson Pollock's pieces from 1947, an early example of his breakthrough drip technique. [Note: while I couldn't include a visual representation of Pollock's piece here for copyright reasons, I did gain permission from my daughter to display her work, Katrina, 2010, finger paint on cardboard.]
In addition to the phrase already being claimed many times over, five fathoms only represents 30 feet of water, which in the scheme of oceanic depths is pretty shallow. If I was going to be writing about how we feel, think and act from our best selves as leaders in a complex ever-changing world, I needed something more profound. Fifty fathoms, or 300 feet, seemed a more appropriate scope for exploring concepts such as executive evolution and how to accelerate wisdom in our rising leaders.
I’m in the early stages of this journey so it is hard to say with fierce certainty exactly what will be covered. That will be emergent. However, you can at the very least look forward to:
observations based on what is going on in the world around us
short range tools and techniques to help us get through today, and
a long range perspective on patterns, trends and that which could be
So that in short is how this blog name was born...Full Fathom Fifty: Soundings in Leadership. I invite you to join me in plumbing the depths for new applications of age-old wisdom.
