If you’re anything like me, you get one or two emails a week with a title beginning with the word “(Correction)”. Fair enough, I suppose, but let’s think about that as a communication (and reputation) issue. Listen, we all make mistakes. Screwing up is a key element of human activity. We’re all busy, stressed, and…
Over the years I’ve thought much about what makes a professional great – and by “professional” I mean anyone who earns their daily bread by trading on their personal skills and attributes. Doctors, engineers, and architects, yes, but also hockey players and bakers and entrepreneurs. If your success lies primarily in your own hands, you’re…
The Great Orange One has just handed us another lesson in leadership. No, not Trump’s leadership, but that of Denmark, the other Nordic countries, Europe, Canada, and several other key players. They taught us again a lesson, one which I used to call “the Skunk Gambit” which I would explain to clients all worked up…
The record is not entirely clear, but it seems Francis Pegahmagabow was born around 1891 on the Shawanaga First Nation (https://shawanagafirstnation.ca/about/population/) , not far from Parry Sound, Ontario. His Ojibwe name was Binaaswi. When he was about three years of age, his father died and his mother, who was very ill, had to go back…
You’re at coffee break at a convention, surrounded by friends and acquaintances old and new, when you spot a colleague across the room. He’s surrounded by half a dozen attendees cracking jokes and renewing acquaintances, clearly all having a good time. And then you notice. His zipper is down. All the way down, and his…
For most of the time I practiced law I kept a clipping from The Lawyers’ Weekly next to my desk. With adjustments for technological change, it’s as true today as it was then, and as true today for any profession or industry. Here’s how it goes: The 1984 Michigan bar survey in question queried lawyers…
I don’t know how many times I’ve been physically ejected from stores late on Christmas Eve, not to mention the occasional crazy bargain, “Sir, how much do you have in your hand? Twenty bucks? Good enough, take the stuff. Now, GO!!!!” Wrapping gifts into the wee hours of Christmas, getting to bed just before the…
Historians generally rate Harry Truman in the top quarter of all American presidents, not a mean feat. But if you had read his résumé, you’d have wondered why on earth President Roosevelt would have ever considered Truman as his running mate. In fact, when FDR died on April 12, 1945, just a few months after…
One would not normally quote Joseph Stalin and John Diefenbaker in the same breath to make the same argument, but let’s do just that. Stalin’s (purported) words were to the point and need little analysis: “When one man dies, that’s a tragedy. When a million men die, that’s a statistic.” Dief the Chief, however, needs…
Alex Fleming was a solid young farm boy from Lochfield farm in Ayrshire, Scotland. Bright enough, at around thirteen he won a two year scholarship to the local academy, then moved to London for further education, eventually settling into the tedium of entering numbers as a shipping clerk. By age twenty he’d really had enough…