Dive into the archives.
- The Madoff Metaphor
While the sentiment of moment is harshly judgmental, it is difficult not to think about Madoff as a metaphor of recent times. He has played his role well in the public drama of shock and blame: stoically bearing guilt within the rituals of censure and condemnation. His decision to turn from trading to the fabrication [...]
- Outflanking the Recession Avalanche: Fighting Depression
Like most of us, I’ve become a newspaper junkie: whether paper or on-line, luxuriating in the onrush of information as markets fluctuate and both corporations and nation-states tremble in the shadow of Moody’s. It’s a pleasure akin to visiting the dental hygienist: the discrete pain of acceptable bloodletting. But then, I have to be in [...]
- Annals of Denial: Follow Your Bliss
Two moments, several hours apart, gave me plenty to think about. The first happened, as three neighbors, all returning from walking our dogs in the park , paused on a street corner, to wait for the traffic light to change. We were chatting about friends and colleagues who’d recently become unemployed. A well-dressed, middle-aged man, [...]
- “Daisy Daisy”: A Reflection Upon Adult Learning
Reflecting on a recent shift between stress and resolution, I can discern the effects of adult learning. I’ve rarely recognized an example so brightly, so distinctly. At its center was my I-phone, upon which I’d become increasingly reliant. Already a generation out of date, it suddenly indicated that I could only access my “favorites”. How [...]
- “Recession Psychosis”
My psychotherapist colleagues knew it was coming, but Saturday’s Times confirmed it: the severe symptoms of anxiety, despair, and even sucidality they’re calling “recession psychosis”— not a formal DSM diagnosis— but descriptive enough. Studies of unemployment reflect that downsizing is the only traumatizing life event which prevents sufferers from returning to their pre-morbid ‘setpoint” of [...]
- 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 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, [...]
- 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 [...]
- A Very Human Response
The poignancy and resilience of the human experience, especially as we undergo difficulty and hard times, is not only a “human asset”. It is our blessing. A reader shares this response to the blog post a few weeks back. Ian- Just finished rereading your post on “Adrenaline Withdrawal” and feel like it was addressed directly [...]
- The Irrationality of Sacrifice In Satisficing
One of the greatest recognitions about organizational decision-making is Nobel Laureate, Herbert Simon‘s notion of “satisficing”. Satisficing is the maximizing of multiple divergent inputs toward a goal based on a weighting of divergent parts. While the end product is rarely ideal from the perspective of any discrete participant’s perspective, its measure of utility is in [...]
