Dive into the archives.
- Millennial Mash-Up and William James
All the honor to you! To you, millennials, beginning or continuing college this year, toiling in late middle school, rebelling in high School under the harsh rod of Algebra 3…… All the Honor to you! I’ve just shown an antique to one of you: a prized, early album of Dave Von Ronk, alluded to on [...]
- Speaking Prose All Along…..
There’s that old story about the fella who discovers that he’s been speaking prose his entire life. That’s what I thought, suddenly, listening to the recently self-employed gentleman, despairing of his recent downsizing. I call him self-employed, though he would not yet admit it: because he’s now on his own. He’s smarting because the conditions [...]
- Making Sense of This Non-Depression
Woke up this morning to the radio announcer’s chirp confirming that the Recession was over and that most economists agreed. OK, it won’t be reflected in employment statistics, and there will be a lot of people out of work, but things are good. We’ll see by the Third Quarter. The S&P is over 900, the [...]
- The Real Stressed Bank Test
My client was stressed. “The banks (or most of them) got a clean bill of health, “ he began. “The market is in a buying frenzy,” he continued. “Then why did my business loan just get denied?” He’d returned from a visit to his bank, the US branch of a famously solvent European outfit; and [...]
- Fixing the Financial System: The Bank of England’s Systemic View of Organizational Behavior
Andrew G. Haldane , Executive Director for Financial Stability of the Bank of England, delivered a remarkable paper at the April 2009 meeting of the Financial Student Association, in Amsterdam. Entitled, “Rethinking the Financial Network”, its deserved acclaim in the world press concerns its reliance on the study of complexity in natural systems: from epidemiology [...]
- Family Business: Opportunity Lost in a Daughter’s Recognition of Dad’s Grumpiness
“Gosh, you’re grumpy today,” I heard, as I parked the car. It hadn’t been addressed to me, but to the man in the car beside me, by his adolescent daughter. Though not feeling particularly grumpy myself, her comment got me thinking. Everyone experiences moods. Some, more frequently and more intensely than others. Everyone experiences moments [...]
- The Ghost of a Former Family Business
Business developments expand and contract in harmony with economic developments. From this vantage, the current recession might be likened not so much to the Great Depression, but to more generalized periods of economic contraction. Yet, just as the ghost of the Great Depression has become a media favorite with which all of us must now [...]
- A Conviction in Economic Recovery
The word “conviction” confirms the outcome of a process of proving. After weighing the evidence, sifting through facts, conviction emerges cognitively through what William James called the “slow heave of the will”. Conviction is solid. Conviction is grounded, based on a foundation. Mania, on the other hand, is an enthusiastic effusion bouncing high in flight [...]
- My Single Tip For Success
The great benefit for a self-help essayist in this era of recession is the value of the singular. How many times I have marveled at the multiplicity of tips offered (often in blocks of 7: at the limits of our human capacity for “chunking”, or holding ideas consistently in our heads) for emotional coping and [...]
- 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 [...]
