What I Stand For Years ago I worked with a guy named Josh, who was my deputy in several roles and at several organizations over some eight years. That is a long time to mentor someone and perhaps an even longer time to be mentored. While he was, technically, a subordinate and was younger than me by a dozen years, I came to think of him more as a peer than a subordinate. Such was…
Reliving My Life I have for a long time prided myself in saying that I have no regrets. That is my way of saying that I feel I have lived a good life and that I have learned form every step I have taken, whether it turned out well for me or badly. I can point to a number of setbacks in my life, but none of them cause me to regret having gone down…
An Expert’s Expert Business is booming. Did I mention that I’m retired? Have I explained about how after 45 years of being in harness, I’m working hard at trying to relax more and be less focused on achievement orientation? Well, I seem to be doing something wrong here because the work just seems to be coming at me more and more rather than less and less. And here’s the thing that I have to admit,…
In Defense of Myself As it turns out, I am still in the heart of Des Moines, biding my time thanks to the opposition in this case deciding that they wanted to spend extra time taking me apart piece by piece. I arrived here on Sunday with the initial expectation that I would give my testimony on Monday or Tuesday. As we began on Monday, it became clear that I was more likely to go…
The Corn Belt There are very few foods I like better than steamed corn on the cob, with lots of butter and salt. In fact, I can easily make a meal out of two or three ears and be very happy with that. Kim understands this and knows that when the summer season rolls around, I am always in search of my next corn dinner. So, today I am on my way to Des Moines,…
A-Aye-Aye-Aye There is nothing like having a front row seat for a megatrend as it starts to roll through and over world culture. It is well established that we are on the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Chairman of the World Economic Forum has said unequivocally that “We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another.” It is generally…
The Hole in My Pocket As a storyteller, I often quip to people that when and if I ever write my proper autobiography (as though these blog stories don’t effectively do that already), I already have a title all picked out for it. I am a big title guy and often use a title to lead me into or out of a story. I guess there is a part of this storyteller that is also…
Ringing the Bell When we moved here more than three years ago, we had to make lots of arrangements to accommodate being here full time rather than only once in a while. We had owned the house for eight years while we thought about when the right time to retire might be. On Wall Street, for various reasons including the stress of the work and the hard head banging that goes on in the business,…
Butter and Markets I am just finishing reading 48 essays on Free Markets for my ethics class. The assignment I gave was to discuss the pros and cons of free markets in the context of being a asylum-seeking immigrant from Central America. It has proven to be a fascinating exercise (at least for me, but I also think for the students) because it has forced them to consider the libertarian value of free market capitalism…
The Demographic Dividend I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about demographics. That stems from my writing of Global Pension Crisis in 2013, because you cannot talk about pensions and retirement dynamics without getting into demographics. I wrote that book on the back of a course I taught about pensions at Cornell’s business school from 2008 until 2017. In fact, I found the demographics that I kept seeing and tallying every year when I…