Leadership, teamwork, democratic workplace
In January 2014 an unprecedented cultural event involving 30,000 people took place in Riga, Latvia. I wrote about it with photos in a 2014 post, “The Spontaneity of Well-Meaning Crowds”*. What was the event?: The “Grāmatu draugu ķēde” (The Chain of Booklovers) which moved some 2000 gift and duplicate books, hand over hand in a…
One day in winter a hungry Grasshopper applied to an Ant for some of the food which they had stored. “Why,” said the Ant, “did you not store up some food for yourself, instead of singing all the time?” “So I did,” said the Grasshopper; “so I did; but you fellows broke in and carried…
The self-help industry has a new term: Mattering. A recent story in the Wall Street Journal addresses that less-than-loving feeling once you are turned out to pasture: “The Retirement Crisis No One Warns You About: Mattering: … How to continue to feel seen and valued.” It brings to mind a previous essay of mine, “Nobody…
A few years back, I made up a term for a kind of management system or style: cage free. It was a re-purposing of a term found on an egg carton. As you know nowadays there’s more than one way, including “gluten-free”, to market eggs. (There’s no gluten** in eggs.) And, claiming eggs are organic suggests something…
I’ve written of roosters and wild turkeys to illustrate human behavior, especially in the workplace. While humans display compassion more than most in the animal kingdom, there are times when we are less than compassionate in how we treat the less able or the strange. I have another story. This one is about how a…
How a primal craft moved one leader from a world of invoices, inventories, and interruptions to a state in which simple satisfaction came through the act of shaping raw dough into a loaf of bread. I make my own bread, something I’ve been doing for many years. My sourdough “starter” comes from Oklahoma, the gift…
A benefit for me, besides entertainment, of reading fiction is that authors describe situations which may be familiar to us but ones we have failed to articulate. The writer puts into words the ineffable in our lives, those interactions that leave us puzzled or wondering “What was that about? Here are two examples, both from…
“NOW it happens that in America a man who goes up hanging to a Balloon is a Professor. One day a Professor, preparing to make a Grand Ascension, was sorely pestered by Spectators of the Yellow-Hammer Variety, who fell over the Stay-Ropes or crowded up close to the Balloon to ask Fool Questions. They wanted to…
The word, bumptious, has found recent currency, mostly in political discourse, but the Trumpian allusion is not what I’ve in mind. Nor will this be a plea for others, always others, to be kinder and more considerate. Rather, I’ll explore the seeming lack of courtesy (rudeness) which is central to being bumptious. What promotes rudeness?…
While reading Senator John Kennedy’s book, “How to Test Negative for Stupid” (2025) I harked back to Bierce’s biting commentary on American politicians. Bierce had no use for fools, so he would have been delighted to meet Mr. Kennedy, an Oxford graduate, a native of Louisiana and a top notch lawyer. Mr. Kennedy tells, in…