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Tidying up the office today, and admired this piece acquired through work. The year was 2002, and was also the decline of the “dot com” days. Maybe someday it’ll be worth something, unlike all those stock options that expired worthless. 

winter break

One more paper to complete before Winter Break. I've learned a lot this past semester, but it is time for a break.  

I have been going full speed with the doctoral program since May. I am tempted to say that I am burned out...but I am reminded of my high school soccer coach whose favorite reply to that was, "You were never on fire."

Maybe I prefer a slow burn. Back to that last paper, a dispositional reflection. Due Wednesday by midnight. 3-4 pages.

  • Connects (a) the core literature from Leading Organizational Change and (b) your experiences within and outside of the course during the last eight weeks, with at least three specific dispositions listed in the Mindset of a Scholar-Researcher (Concordia University–Portland Office of Doctoral Studies, 2018) material.
  • The essay should address the following questions:
How has your understanding or practice of the three dispositions changed with the new ethics knowledge and experiences you have developed in the course?
How do you envision these three dispositions applying to your future work as an ethical social scientist?


more musings

Posted as a follow-up to my previous musings.

Don't trust the process. Learn to engage with it.

The path to success is a minefield. Keep the following in mind:  

  • Leadership is a team sport.  
  • Most of us (men more so) tend to be overconfident.
  • Memory is more often reconstruction rather than reproduction.
  • Our conscious short term memory is confined to 5–7 things at once.
  • Multitasking is subject to error.
  • We sincerely believe things from the past that are simply not true; we provide explanations of the past or the present that put ourselves in a good light, and others less so.
  • After a point, more information makes people less accurate than having less information (the overload problem).
  • We don’t like to make mistakes but we dislike even more admitting them.
  • Our best lies are ones that we firmly believe to be true.
  • Confidence may be negatively related to accuracy and in any case is no predictor that you have something right.
  • And worst of all, a lot of this occurs in our subconscious brain, so that ‘‘introspection alone will not help our vision, because it will simply confirm our self-justifying beliefs’’ (Tavris & Aronson, 2007, p. 44). 

Gather. Build. Protect.

✪ see the Dunning-Kruger Effect and Dunbar's Number