Dive into the archives.
- The Business of Family
Awash in information, we scan the headlines continuously, adjusting our ongoing visions of externalities upon which we depend: politics, economics, and shifts in the markets. We trust the fine attunement of our filtering capabilities to deliver a unified picture of the front pages we consume from multiple sources- sometimes print, sometimes tv, increasingly internet. Our [...]
- 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 [...]
- 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, [...]
- 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 [...]
- “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 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 [...]
- 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 [...]
- The Current Economic Climate
The Irish, in their euphemistic wisdom, have a term for our shared, global situation: “The CEC”. The term seems to have originated in the early years of this millennium, as the Celtic Tiger began its run; and judging from the bitterness about the CEC on blogs from that time, it must have begun as a [...]
