Dive into the archives.
- Retirement Tsunami
Those of us who have worked in organizations know that as individuals leave their roles in departments, or on committees, vital knowledge is often lost. With single departures, we find that certain problem dimensions are not addressed. My colleague Angela, for example, paid particular attention to economic trends in the staffing of R&D departments. With [...]
- The CEC: Stacking the Middle-Aged Deck To Failure
The developmental effect of the “Current Economic Climate” upon the under-employed middle aged worker, is to force the normative later-life crisis of generativity vs stagnation before its time. The crisis itself is to be expected– worked through across the years in contemplation of one’s lifetime of accomplishments and failures. But the additional external pressures of [...]
- The Real Shift in Middle Age Development
The current economic climate in the United States serves as a catalyst for a shift in the normative developmental tasks of middle age. The popular twentieth century pattern of career leading to retirement has ended. Partly obscured within the spiraling numbers of unemployed workers of all ages, is the high incidence of professional knowledge workers, [...]
- Organizational Coaching for Individuals During Unemployment
The dialogs between the blog writer and the reader begin in the blog post’s generalization and develop according to increasingly particular themes. These are initially signaled by the reader/respondent who brings them to the essayist’s attention. They are then elaborated through successive pairings of letter and response between correspondents. Thinking about this process along the [...]
- Passivity,Activity, and the Current Economic Climate
The reframing of problem as opportunity is the mantra of the current economic climate (CEC). And from within our chanting, whether through gritted teeth or genuine optimism, we have the choice of passivity or activity. Passively, we may be mesmerized by our decrements: in spending power, in the small luxuries we’d become accustomed to, and [...]
- Joy in Discovery of Received Wisdom
We cannot rediscover what we do not know. And this is the paradox in learning from “received wisdom”. Its reception is often within fields of knowledge foreign to us. The wisdom may be common enough to practitioners in the field, but to others? It is as if it never existed. Surprise or mentorship may bring [...]
- On Purposive Reading
Getting a foothold in the universe of blogging, I have discovered that the antithesis of “composing” one’s life, is probably the “composting” of meaning — which occurs through random accumulation, however initially purposive the intellectual pursuit. Several concrete examples winked at me as bell weathers of this concept. The first was Slate’s summary of news [...]
- 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 [...]
