Cracking Up It’s falling apart for Trump…again. How many lives can this cat have? Is this a dead cat bounce or is he likely to rise again from the ashes and regain lost momentum? He was getting pummeled about his handling of El Paso and Dayton (while his fellow septuagenarian, Joe Biden was getting slammed for his thoughts on Houston and Michigan…ouch!) and then the markets started to gyrate. Out of desperation, he came…
Loving New York In 1964 I made my first trip to New York City. I may have been here before that but at age ten I can remember the visit with my mother and sisters on a visit from our home in Middleton, Wisconsin. We drove there in our white Chrysler New Yorker, strangely enough. We went to see the World’s Fair, which proved to be especially significant to my view of the future…
The Empty Chair We now have the iconic symbol of the Trump presidency. As we have all seen, Trump chose to absent himself from the G-7 meeting on Global Climate Change. He literally was a no-show, leaving an empty chair at the roundtable of world leaders. There are several ways to interpret this phenomenon. To begin with, there are a series of empty chair metaphors. I suppose it is possible that as a student…
The Eisenhower Cohort General Dwight David Eisenhower (a.k.a. Ike) was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces throughout its existence. That is when we all know he guided the efforts of Operation Overlord 75 years ago and pushed for the reclamation of continental Europe from the clutches of the fascist Nazi war machine. The books and stories that recount those daring days are plentiful and we have almost all seen some version of the…
Pavlov’s Dilemma In high school, a friend of mine wrote a paper titled Rascal Rasputin Rampages Russia about the end of the Romanov Empire and the lead-up to the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the most impactful populist overthrows in human history, and a mere 100 years ago. When I was in college, I was a dual major in Economics and Government with a focus on development economics. I spent some considerable time studying comparative…
We Need a Hero A rainy night, a lonely road, a scratchy windshield wiper, a flash of light from the sky, and a roaring turbine with a sick metallic whine. Then Dustin Hoffman, his face covered in aviation grease and his wet and soggy socks dragging from his limping feet, wanders up the muddy slope after saving fifty-four airline passengers from the exploding inferno that was flight 104 from New York. Andy Garcia is a…
Teaching to Learn I am way too impressionable. Not like Trump, who adopts whatever posture he has been advised to consider by the latest person to talk to him. But when I hear or read something that strikes me as valid, I take it to heart and most importantly, I try and act on it. Yesterday, my wife and I were talking about how to keep track of things we need to do. She likes…
No Joking Zone I am a strong believer in the value of a sense of humor. To me, being able to joke around about things sets people at ease and helps to break down the hierarchical barriers that often prevent the level of open communications that are essential in good management. There are many cautionary signs these days about what one jokes about. Since many people create jokes that are either off-color or politically-incorrect…
While Rome Burns Back in 1989 I went to the Amazon on a side-trip connected to a business trip to Brazil. In the prior five years, I had been back and forth to Latin America dozens of times as I ran first the Latin debt crisis team and then built from the ashes the Emerging Markets Department of Bankers Trust. During that time Brazil was our biggest debtor at over $1 billion and one…
The Sovereign State of Mine, Mine, Mine Yes, you heard that tight, Donald Trump is having a temper tantrum over a place he’s never been, has only 50,000 indigenous inhabitants (the size of Sheboygan, Wisconsin), and has only one and a half golf courses, one of which appears to be on a glacier or something similar. What it does have is a lot of land, with less and less ice and something called rare…