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How Students Taught Me the Best Strategy for Changing the Game
It was 1973 and I was sitting in the faculty lounge at a New England boarding school listening to the veteran teachers bemoan the state of “students today.” The consensus seemed to be that students were unmotivated, unengaged, poorly prepared, and lazy. “They never speak up in class and just sit there like bumps on…
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The Art of Yak Shaving Revisited
A while ago, my son Teague introduced me to the concept of “yak shaving.” If you do a web search you get a few definitions which are variations on a theme. They boil down to something like “activities you find yourself doing which appear unrelated to the objective you started out with but which, in fact, are…
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Five Steps to Meaningful Giving: Maybe It’s Time To Channel Your Inner Scrooge
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Being Smart About Being Smart: Invite Others Into a Shared Thought Process
Arne Lewis, was my Art History professor and advisor. He combined a soft-spoken style with an intense curiosity about how people learn. I still remember his critique of my draft of my first chapter of what would be a hundred-page senior thesis. “There are a lot of provocative ideas here,” he said, “but I am…
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A Secret to Special Relationships – Cultivating Ordinary Time
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Time You Made the Move to a Mac? What I Learned in the First Two Weeks
I finally have made the move from my PC desktop to a MacBook Air. I have been primarily using MSDOS and Windows PCs since the beginning (and CPM machines before that), so let’s just say “a long time.” I have even enjoyed customizing and repairing them on occasion. I have a sizeable knowledge investment in PCs,…
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Three Secrets to Becoming Your Own Tech Support – Your Children Will Thank You
According to family legend, my great-uncle Edwin said before he got into his first car, “Anyone who can drive a horse and buggy can certainly drive a car.” At which point, he got behind the wheel, put the car in gear and drove across the front lawn through the neighbor’s picket fence and finally came…
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Three Keys to the Successful Launch of a New Employee that I Learned Baling Hay
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Confronting the Near Enemy: Is One Emotion Masquerading as Another?
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What Am I Missing Here? Five Ways to Make the Invisible Visible
Have you ever been in a meeting where, based on what you see and hear, you expect the meeting to be playing out in one way but instead it is going in another direction entirely? You suspect something is going on beneath the surface and that you are missing something important that would make sense of…