I’m Joining the Professionals

Professional Excellence: Beyond Technical Competence
Alan P. Rositer

What exactly is a professional? You must admit, it’s one of the more challenging words in the English language.

Sometimes it’s an adjective, one often applied to adults paid to play children’s games. Sometimes it’s a noun, intended to convey that the person identifying with it is more rigorously schooled and trained in a particular body

Advertisement

Born Standing Up and Talking Back

In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business
Charlan Nemeth

A Fortune 500 CEO who repeatedly voiced his desire to entertain a wide range of thinking once publicly clarified that position for me. Skepticism, he averred, is good. It shows your mind is working.  Just don’t make a habit of it.

I’m pretty sure Charlan Nemeth would find at least half

Watch the Parking Meters

“Leadership–It’s a System Not a Person”
Barbara Kellerman
Daedalus, Summer 2016

By now it should be apparent I rarely seek information where everyone else does. I don’t even really look for it. I just tend to stumble across things and find a use for them later.

That’s certainly the case with the Summer 2016 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In what has to be one of the more fortuitous

Is it What’s Needed or What’s Missing?

Certain things usually alert me to flee. One of them is failure of the writing and editorial process. While such failure is often of the ‘I know it when I see it’ variety, there are some lapses that almost anyone can see.

As in this sentence: “The purpose of an aircraft carrier is to carry aircraft.” It comes from an article entitled “Shipmates: Life on an Aircraft Carrier“ by Geoff Dyer that appears in the Journeys (April 21, 2014) issue of the New Yorker. (Pay wall, but you can get a free 1-month trial.) Between the title and that sentence there’s little reason to read on.

And yet I did.

I’ve said before that I have a reading hair shirt that drives me to complete even

What if it is a myth?

The Management Myth:
Why the Experts Keep Getting it Wrong
Matthew Stewart

Some things are too important to be left to the experts. Arguably that includes running a business. Matthew Stewart, I think, might agree with that statement.

Stewart is a penitent, former management consultant. There is an entire sub-genre of management consulting tell-alls that usually leaves one wondering why such firms persist given how poorly they treat their clients. Stewart’s book avoids being merely