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…
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…
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…
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…
Luxury Redefined The concept of luxury comes from some combination of Latin, Old French and Old English and generally meant excessive extravagance. It was generally considered in olden days to be decadent, bordering on offensiveness. But then society decided to change all of that a few hundred years ago and the concept of luxury turned more benign, or at least less troubling. It became a standard of extreme comfort that may have gone beyond pure…
Long Distance Grieving I am packed and ready to head to the airport for a Redeye flight to JFK, arriving tomorrow there at the bright and early time of 5am. I know I won’t sleep much on the flight even though i am traveling in Jet Blue’s Mint service, which had lie-flat seats. I used to sleep like a baby on overnight flights when I was in full work harness, but those days and those…
The Game of Law This week has been a news cycle of one thing after another focused on who and what falls within the boundaries of the rule of law. The rule of law is more than a collection of four words, it is a political philosophy that lies at the center of the modern world, whether you believe in it as a guiding principle of governance or as something that is irrelevant and bears…
Surrendering to CostCo Everyone thinks that CostCo started in Kirkland, Washington, just outside of Seattle back in 1983, just when Howard Schultz was getting his hands on this little coffeehouse startup called Starbucks and starting to rev it up into a global retailing juggernaut. But by virtue of its merger with another big-box retailer named Price Club, CostCo can claim to have started back in 1976 right here in good old San Diego. The behemoth…