Back in business school at Cornell, the most notable professor was a guy by the name of Hal Bierman. Hal taught finance. I had the unique experience of taking finance from Hal while his son was also taking finance. That’s a strange experience, but I’m sure it was more strange for both him and his son. Hal was a serious guy who tried hard to be pleasant and avuncular, but who always seemed more serious…
I see that Pope Leo XIV has weighed in on AI. He happened to comment about AI in conjunction with nuclear weapons, but the broader topic is the regulation of AI for one reason or another. The recent widespread broadcast of sexually explicit images on Elon Musk’s Grok AI certainly has caused a furor in the European Union. But let’s face it, regulation and especially regulation of world-changing technology like AI is one of those…
I can’t see more than 100 feet this morning on account of a heavy and foreboding fog that has enveloped our hilltop. It’s a pretty normal January day here in San Diego with the high temperature expected to be about 60 with the morning starting out in the low 50s. There is really nothing to complain about weather wise. That’s not the case for most of the rest of the country, where the temperatures have…
I have always been an optimist. I’ve also always believed in the power of positive thinking, less because of some metaphysical effect it might have, but rather because optimism and attitude breed an environment that others find motivating and there is no doubt in my mind that motivation is what makes the world go around. Other’s often consider my attitude naive or Pollyannaish. But that has never stopped me and I will honestly say that…
Once again, Donald Trump has shown us his bluster and bullshit is off the charts. I don’t know whether to be be amused, not surprised, relieved or disgusted by his speech this morning in Davos at the World Economic Forum. The global markets reacted immediately and badly over Trump’s rants and raves about invading Greenland (or was it Iceland?) if there was no deal to be made. It’s hard to tell if they really thought…
I’ve suddenly had this weird realization. I started listening to several of the Dan Brown novels on symbology. I started with his latest, called Secret of Secrets and have moved backwards to The Lost Symbol. The book is Dan Brown’s third Robert Langdon novel, set in Washington D.C. over a single night. The central mystery revolves around Freemasonry and the legend of an “Ancient Mystery” – secret wisdom supposedly hidden in Washington D.C. by the…
About 15 years ago I was Chairman of the Advisory Council of the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. I had been very active in the school as an alumnus since almost 1990 and had both served on the Advisory Council and then acted as its Chairman for a number of years. Back in 2003 I was inducted into the the Johnson School Hall of Honor and had my face placed in bronze…
For the better part of fifty years, my career was a moveable feast with me doing different things every few years. For many of those years this was not of my doing, but rather a function of moving where I was asked to go and doing what I was asked to do. Early on I adopted a persona of someone who liked new challenges and embraced change and that image became who I was. I…
I spend a lot of time going back and forth about whether I like excitement or calmness in my life. I can’t tell if I feel more this way about life than others, but I certainly expect that I am not alone in this quandary. When things are too exciting, I yearn for stability and normalcy and when things get too normal, I get bored and start seeking out excitement. Sound familiar? If I broaden…
I turn 72 in a few weeks and I’ve been living out here for six years, which means I’ve been retired for at least five years. Retirement is one of my favorite topics to write about for some reason, and always has been since I started writing for fun forty years ago. I am not sure where this obsession with retirement comes from, but it probably originated just about forty years ago when I took…