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My friend Steve runs an excellent board meeting. One of the things he always sets aside time for in the meeting is “capacity building” – activities that on the surface don’t seem to have much to do with the business of a state board. They are crucial, though – they […]

High school students: you aren’t going to like the easy jobs in life. Easy jobs are dull. Easy jobs don’t let you be creative. Easy jobs don’t provide advancement. Get good at hard jobs now. Get good at doing more than what is asked. Get good at spinning many plates. […]

What I’m looking for in a performance? Breath. I’m not interested in a choir singing exactly the way they sang in last night’s rehearsal. What’s the magic of that? Sometimes the breath comes from an edge of danger. Music slightly too difficult to perform easily. An unexpected starting tempo that […]

You spend your life looking for people who are “my kind of unique.” Weird like us. Fellow geeks. There are people I recognized in ten seconds as on the same road as me. The trick is knowing them from the people at the same intersection, but on a different road. In […]

Are you a coach or a guru? A great coach gets people to achieve by pushing them further than they think they can go, keeping the pressure intense. When we were preparing students for jobs with vertical structure – bosses with bosses – the skill of being pushed by a […]

Stinging nettles are a pervasive and troublesome weed. Minuscule hairs all over the plant “act as hypodermic needles and inject histamines into the skin of anyone trying to pull them” (Wikipedia), and underground rhizomes allow them to multiply quickly and resist weeding. What possessed someone try cooking and eating them? […]

I’m not new in trying a screen sabbath. Many influential thinkers advise a break from our constant connection to devices and the news stream. I recently enjoyed Pico Iyer’s new one-sitting book, The Art of Stillness. In it, he quotes Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine: I […]

Last week The Real Group (of Sweden) shared a picture from their Japanese tour, where they were promoting fellow harmony group Rajaton (of Finland). It’s not the first time: they shared a story with me of doing a gig in Germany for the second year in a row, and urging […]

Senseless tragedy is again enveloping our nation; as Charles Pierce wrote, it isn’t unthinkable or unspeakable – it was thought up, and we must speak about it. For me, moving forward begins with remembering words like these. Recognize that there are ties between us, All men and women living on […]

As part of Programming Week, today I suggest you take part in the Alice Is 90 celebration during the 2015-16 season.Melodious Accord, the nonprofit organization led by Alice Parker, is promoting the 2015-16 concert season as one to celebrate. On December 16, Alice will celebrate her 90th birthday. She is still writing, […]