The Power Elite What a strange world we live in. I feel it is even stranger for me than it is for most. I am a white male born of privilege, but raised with a liberal ideology. My paternal grandfather was a fascist, one of Mussolini’s men from the region of northern Italy near Bassano del Grappa in the Tyrol. He was either a bully like young Benito or more likely just a sycophant trying…
Hunting for Hunter This title will probably do more to raise the readership of my blog among my red friends than anything other than one denouncing Hillary for something obscure and yet serious, like the mishandling of top secret government document. But while the story has nothing to do with Hunter Biden and why right wing deflectors need a bane of their existence to distract them from all the very real, growing and harsh criticism…
Papyrus Denial There are very few places in the world I either have not been to or do not care about returning to. That is not to say I cannot get enthusiastic about a trip to a specific spot by specific means with specific other travelers. I do not dislike foreign travel, I’ve just done so damn much of it that I am less and less enthusiastic about prioritizing it. I know it sounds boring…
Journaling Every once in a while I will look back over my blog stories for one reason or another. I have now been doing this under the Old Lone Ranger monicker since early 2019 when my son Thomas told me I should do it. That is three years and seven months or about 1,300 days. My blogging software feeds me all sorts of statistics that I generally ignore since I am not doing this commercially…
Contrite Is as Contrite Does The concept of contrition is often thought to be associated with Catholicism. We think of sitting in a confessional and leaving with the seemingly trivial penance of saying so many Hail Mary’s or Novenas to absolve ourselves of our sins. But contrition is a far more general and important concept for modern life than these old, somewhat antiquated memories or images. We all need to start from a common basis…
Auto-Woke Part of upping my game as a professor this year is that I am trying to go beyond the technology platform I have used for the dozen years I have been teaching graduate business school. My approach to teaching has been to structure my lectures (which have all tended to be two to three hours in length) using PowerPoint slides. The Microsoft Office Suite has ruled my and many other people’s business life for…
The Business of Business I have spent forty-seven years in business. I know exactly how that happened. I entered college as an engineering student, typically strong in math and science, or so I thought. I say that with suspicion because where I went to school in Rome, I was way outside the mainstream of American educational enhancement and was quite out of it when it came to the current standards of excellence in high school…
Laughing It Up While I was just in NYC (actually more in Connecticut than NYC), I had the opportunity to have breakfast with my old friend Roger Baumann. Roger is just about the sweetest guy I know. It’s not just me that feels this way, Kim says the same thing about him all the time too. The only person as sweet as Roger is his lovely wife Julie, but I don’t get to see her…
Flying Through New York I spent forty-four years living in and around New York City. I lived twenty-six years in Manhattan, three years on Staten Island, one year in Queens and thirteen years in a nearby Long Island town of Rockville Centre. That’s a long time for someone who never really thought about living in the Big Apple before it happened after business school. For thirty-four of those years I had the benefit of one…
Redefining Ethics It would be very easy to write endlessly about the revamping of the American and even global foundations of ethics in this crazy mixed-up time we are living through. I am spending some time right now updating the syllabus for my ethics course this fall. I taught the course for the first time this spring and I was surprised by two things. First of all, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of…