The eyes are the windows of the soul. This is why we find it jarring when someone speaks to us without making any eye contact– a key signal of sincerity is missing. Similarly, when I am speaking to you, if I don’t check in on your eyes and face I miss most of your important…
In every election some pundits will write that a losing candidate had “peeked too soon”. Timely peeking, it would appear, is critical for politicians. Little kids also consider peeking too soon to be very bad form. To be fair to journalists under pressure, they’re not the only ones who let themselves look silly. We’re all…
We all get them from time to time– clients who know more about the subject matter than we do and are happy to remind us of this at every turn. They won’t take our instructions, won’t do their homework, won’t respond to requests for information, and more often than not, see no good reason to…
While it’s entirely possible to practice a profession as a one-person operation, it’s not typical. More often than not we operate with support from one or more individuals who help us leverage our skills and knowledge. In “normal times” this may be a cast of thousands physically present in cubicles or it may be one…
The dream of personal and professional betterment is no new thing. The ancients have much to teach on the subject, and human nature hasn’t changed. Take, for example, the biblical admonition, “…let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that…
The Government of Ontario has just announced it’s getting rid of its fax machines. Actually going to do it. No more studies, no more Royal Commissions, no more White Papers– this time there’s real action! Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy says that by the end of the year, they’ll be gone. Gone. The minister explained it…
There are roughly eight billion of us on this planet, and not one of the other 7,999,999,999 is quite like you. The closest you may get is in the case of identical twins, and even there, one is born before the other. Not only does your DNA differentiate you from everyone except your identical twin…
It was 1917. Canada was just fifty years old, barely out of colonial status, and deeply committed to Britain’s European war– a war like nothing before, brutal and costly. The federal government was financially exhausted and needed money. The clever solution was a temporary tax on personal and corporate income. Temporary, yes, but the Finance…
In our personal and professional lives we inevitably tackle and grind out projects. Writing this edition of the Friday Briefing, for instance, is a project. It has a deadline, a slot to fill, a purpose, and the germ of an idea at the heart of it. It is, at one and the same time, a…
I love the image of pushing a rope. I mean, it sounds so silly, doesn’t it? We all know that trying to push a rope is only going to frustrate you, and probably the rope, too. I suppose that if you really insisted, you could soak a piece of rope and freeze it. That might…