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A big story is just a collection of little stories

Above my desk is a wall of pictures. It’s not the “brag wall” of executives or politicians showing off all the famous or important people I’ve met. No, it’s pictures of family and moments going back...

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No one is the villain in their own story

If my mother were still around, I’m sure she would be a Bernie Sanders supporter. At heart, she was a communist. Dad was your classic engineer. Both were from blue collar roots. In that environment,...

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Finding a Guiding Principle

I used a picture of a woodpecker last week and I promised the story that went with it. Jerry Weinberg was a computer programmer and author who wrote often about the impact of information technology. He...

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Ritual by design

My first experience with ritual was as an altar boy when being a boy was a prerequisite and you had to memorize the responses in Latin. Others may have thought about the ritual aspects; I was mostly...

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You can’t win. Play anyway

One of the first office jobs I held was the summer after my freshman year in college. I worked for McDonnell Aircraft Company. as a material accounting cost clerk. MDAC was a defense contractor that...

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Turtles all the way done: hijacking stories to your own ends

Terrapin stack There’s an old parable that I first remember encountering in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. It often surfaces in explorations of the collision between science and myth. In...

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Picking an organizational stack

I suspect my early experiences with organizations were similar to most. Most of what we encountered was pretty simple to see and understand. We were students in a classroom, there was a teacher in the...

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Working in the boundaries – making the pieces fit together

“Specialization is for insects” Robert A. Heinlein Between can be a difficult location. Cast or crew. Analog or digital. Quant or sales. Worker bee or management. Head or heart. If you choose to...

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Out of place: finding a place to stand

“Where did you prep?” A simple question posed by another freshman taking in the sight of a thousand other freshmen (3/4s of them men) scattered about Cannon Green on the campus of Princeton University....

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Simple Questions that aren’t so Simple

“Where did you go to school?” It’s an innocuous cocktail party question that pops up fairly early. You would think that the answers would be simple. Not necessarily. In St.Louis, where I grew up, this...

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