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 […]
The character, Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is the epitome of the cranky miser, but as my father liked to point out, there are really two Scrooges, the lonely unhappy man at the beginning of the story and the happy generous one at the end. There is a little Scrooge in all of us, […]
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 […]
A grandpa and his grand-daughter are walking to school. He is here for a few weeks and it’s a morning ritual. She runs ahead to pick up a crimson sweet gum leaf and comes back to deposit it in his hand. He is the explorer’s bank, the archive. He appreciates with interest. She is walking […]
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, […]
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 […]
Mr. Lemmel was my first manager. I was a suburban kid working as a farm hand for the summer. On my first day, he needed me to help bale hay. He drove a tractor over to his gas pump to fill up the tank for the day. Then he told me to sit in the […]
One of the reasons I like reading fiction is that every now and then, an author will sneak a wonderful bit of wisdom into a story that grabs me in a way that is much more memorable than if I had read it in a textbook or journal article. Usually when I discover such a passage, […]
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 […]
You should hire three-dimensional people who have depth, breadth, and length. I am not a fan of the prevailing belief system among hiring managers that you have to make a trade-off between technical depth and breadth of interpersonal competence for example. I cringe when I hear a hiring manager say something like “the guy can’t […]
