Category Archives: Models
The latest crazy talk people have hit me with is describing not flying and avoiding garbage as “unsustainable” and “impossible.” Many say I’m wasting my time. As best I can tell, they’re excusing themselves for living against their values, but it’s let me to see my behavior in new ways. Call me crazy, but I believe polluting less is the future, no matter how impossible it seems for people who[…] Keep reading →
Frances Hesselbein is a hero and mentor to me. Her TED talk’s bio is too brief to covers all her achievements, but gets the top ones: One of the most highly respected experts in the field of contemporary leadership development, Frances Hesselbein is the President and CEO of The Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute, founded as The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management and renamed in 2012 to honor Hesselbein’s[…] Keep reading →
Sometimes you discover a way of doing things so obviously more effective than how you were taught that you can’t believe how twisted our society has become. The new way shows how much the systems we’ve created twist us to fit their goals, however much those goals smother and corrupt our basic humanity that served us for hundreds of thousands of years, living in harmony with our world, and still[…] Keep reading →
[On March 2, Quartz published my piece, Schumpeter Strikes Again: Why the Ivy League could end up like the big 3 carmakers: utterly disrupted. Here is an earlier, unedited version. Unedited means it has its flaws—too long for a magazine, too short for a book—but it develops some ideas beyond what Quartz had space for.] Uneducated at Any GPA Is the Ivy League Today Big 3 Auto of the 1960s?[…] Keep reading →
You don’t get married and it’s done. You adopt a new mindset that it’s not just you and you live that way for the rest of your life. It’s always a part of your life, and you love the change. Having a child takes it to the next level. You take on more responsibility, and you love the change. The challenges never stop coming, never get easier, and never repeat,[…] Keep reading →
EDIT: I recorded a podcast version of this post (episode 63) that covered same views beyond this post: If anything marked the beginning of the industrial revolution, it was James Watt’s steam engine. It wasn’t the first steam engine, but was more efficient than any before. More efficient means using less energy and less pollution, right? Wrong. Each engine, yes, but more people used engines, so Watt engines used more[…] Keep reading →
Since most people I know voted for Clinton, I presume most of my readers did. Though I don’t like Trump as president, as long as tens of millions of Americans voted for him, I hope my readers represent the population more faithfully than the population of lower Manhattan. Trump’s win surprised most Clinton supporters. My reaching out to Trump voters and speaking with them explained a lot to me. The[…] Keep reading →
American cuisine has two simple rules governing it, I found. You often have to step outside a system to see it with fresh eyes. First, I’ll describe that process. Stepping outside the system We’ve seen pictures of plastic choking once-pristine beaches and wilderness. One day three years ago I looked down at my kitchen’s garbage and saw that most of my garbage came from food packaging. I decided to try[…] Keep reading →
In this country, mentioning any deviation from capitalism flips people into communism and socialism. This black-and-white thinking explains why Reagan and Thatcher opposed Nelson Mandela fighting Apartheid—supporting a party promoting blatant, destructive racism. They supported the party started by supporters of Nazis—a term we throw around today to mean figuratively, but the creators of Apartheid supported Hitler in the 30s and 40s. Maybe because Thatcher was prime minister of empire[…] Keep reading →