Dive into the archives.
- Acquaintance With Others
The art of curating one’s life presents itself in real-time challenges. The first step is in taking an internal inventory of the bits and pieces of personal history. Un-tethered from pride and shame— the borders of the familiar narratives we tell ourselves— what we’ve got is a fairly interesting assortment of stuff: like the tables [...]
- From Elevator Pitch to Tag Cloud
The elevator pitch is an efficient message form whose time has passed. Think of the elevator itself as metaphor: a tiny moving room, with time enough only to alert another captive individual to the particulars of one’s self-presentation. A reframing or re-description of the pitch, more congruent with our times is the visual presentation of [...]
- On Balance at Year’s End
The beauty of the Balance Sheet is in its clean demarcations and sharp clarities. The summarized ledger: the readable picture. Momentarily, we are distracted from the ongoing accounting of profits and loss at the financial-emotional border. Momentarily, we are distracted from the calculations of cash flow that accompany us through the solvencies and insolvencies of [...]
- What Banks Know
Some years ago, before Depression panic gripped the world, I had the opportunity to consult with several members of the banking industry. Each was involved in an obscure area of work, destined to become headline news within a few years. And whether discussing complex derivative trades or the structuring of collateralized debt obligation tranches, each [...]
- Mister Market
Mr Market, goes the common wisdom, suffers from bipolar disorder. We join him in his enthusiasms—momentarily gratifying our greed and desire as we attempt to amplify wealth; and then our stomachs tighten and grip as his mood swing plummets to strip our dreams. We say the losses are on “paper”; but bitterly remember that the [...]
- Too Loose in Place of Too Tight
Attending a recent networking meeting of C-level executives, I was struck by an unaddressed cultural disconnect between presenters’ assumptions and the worlds from which attendees had come. Addressing “how to” aspects of job search, the recruitment and career advisement professionals uniformly advocated the use of social networking. Future jobs, they said, would come not from [...]
- A Circle of Happiness
Tolstoy was right. In a sense . All happy families are similar. But a brilliant study, just out in the BMJ, drawn from 20 years of epidemiological research in the Framingham Heart Study, illustrates how. Authors JH Fowler and NA Christakis trace the workings of social networks and the “contagion” of happiness among nearby friends [...]
- Embracing the Slash
I woke this morning to the radio’s discussion by a chipper 20-something about her “slashes”. It took a few moments to figure out what she was saying, which was shorthand for freelance projects. She began each with her profession, followed by a “slash”, and then a description of a task. She’d just been fired from [...]
