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…
Florida Calling My kids all love theme parks and especially so Disney World and Disneyland. I have many stories from their youth to depict this passion for a fun day of rides, lines and mediocre food, but none quite reaches up to the heights of my daughter’s honeymoon. As the dutiful father of the bride, I gave them two weeks in Tahiti, thinking that would be an ideal spot post-nuptial. I should have remembered that…
Joshua Treed This weekend Kim and I are spending our time in Joshua Tree on the southern edge of the Mojave Desert. The occasion is the 40th birthday gathering for Kim’s nephew (technically my nephew as well), Joshua. I don’t know that he chose the venue for the gathering because of the name he shares with the area, but I’m also sure that the coincidence did not miss his attention. We are organized and led…
Paying Your Share I have been lately using what I will call a Donald Trump tax trick. I lost a bundle a few years ago on a perfectly valid attempt to launch a business with my son. Many of my friends attended Winter Wonderland on Staten Island so they know I spent a lot of money making that extravaganza work in one sense (the attraction was well-attended) and not work in another (for various reasons…
RBG Rollover Yesterday when I went out in the car to run an errand, MSNBC came on through my Sirius Satellite radio and I found myself in the middle of a live Q&A between the Supreme Court justices and the Attorney General of Mississippi (Scott Stewart) and the U.S. Solicitor General, Elizabeth B. Prelogar. While Stewart’s responses to justices’ questions were competent and articulate (as much as I disagreed with most of them on principle),…