Falling Down and Being True I tend not to be drawn to keeping up with celebrity lifestyles. Who is married or getting divorced to whom? What’s hot and what’s not? Who’s got a killer series on Netflix and is Netflix really the happening place for the real glitterati that are making their move to the A List? I find it all mildly interesting, but its very easy to get to feeling like a groupie with…
The Sovereign State of AT&T When I was in college and studying Latin American political history, we were reviewing the recent political changes in Chile. While a small country, Chile was symbolic because it was very much an isolated country on the far side of the world. In the days before the Panama Canal, anything on the Pacific side of the Andes was a long way from home and if you went th Chile, unlike…
Pershing Square I am writing this story for my pal Larry, who will be worried as hell for the next 1,300 or so words that I am going to say something in writing and that it will be put onto the internet, which is immutable as an NFT, and that it will be something that will stick to his foot like a random piece of dirty chewing gum. It gets me chuckling inside just to…
Mistletoe We are gearing up for the holidays around here this week because we are scheduled to head out to NYC to see the kids for a few days. The last time we saw them was September when we were supposed to be heading to Spain and Portugal, but cancelled the motorcycle trip since some in our group were not so comfortable with the feinting surge in the Delta variant. So, we spent a week…
Doling it Out Yesterday was a national day of mourning and it was both unusual and yet very much an important and necessary event for the nation. I was nine years old in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas at the Texas Book Depositary Building as his motorcade drove past. While it was in the days when cell phones didn’t exist and not everyone carried around portable video recording capabilities…
New Story – Old Saga I’m sitting at the San Diego Airport with Kim, having just had a mediocre burger before boarding a Red-eye flight on Jet Blue to NYC. We get in at 5am at JFK and then hopefully get our checked bags (filled with Christmas gifts for the kids) fast enough to schlep over to the cab stand, which is a country mile from the main Terminal 5, and get on the GCP…
Test Taking I am sitting in room 223 of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice on the campus of University of San Diego. I am sitting here more of less quietly while sixteen students in the graduate business school program, in search of their MBA degrees are taking the final exam in my GSBA 520 Advanced Corporate Finance course. The exam has been underway for about 35 minutes so far and the…
Eat Shit and Live When people are disgusted with one another and need to find a horrible thing to say to them to just show them how mad they are and how much they dislike them in that moment, they sometimes say something like, “East shit and die!” When you think about it, it is quite a nasty thing to say to another person. When we say, “Go to hell!” We are telling that person…
Methods of Expression I got into a funny debate with my birthday-boy nephew last weekend while we were all gathered out in Joshua Tree. There was no set agenda, but rather a loose schedule of dinners and a few hikes with the rest of the time left largely unstructured for people to do as they please and commune both with one another and the surrounding desert landscape. The Airbnb that was the central gathering spot…
The Ethical Dimension Next semester I will be teaching a course a course at the University of San Diego that is a required course for all MBA students. It is called Law, Policy and Ethics, but the course is really about the ethics of business. It has long been my objective to teach such a course, so I am working very hard to make it a good one and not just a collection of stories…