Tomorrow afternoon I am going to interview Roy Goble about his new book, “Junkyard Wisdom Rebuilt” and one of the themes in the book and Roy’s life is his relationship with his father. I want to know more about that as it sounds like we had similar experiences. Before he died we took week-long trips together to walk and talk. Years ago while riding the train through the Canadian Rockies, I asked him to reflect on giving. While he had practiced giving all his life, I had never seen anything in writing. Dad talked it out with me while I scribbled some notes. Roy quotes John Chrysostom in his…

My father was a humorist. That is different from being a joker. Mark Twain was a humorist. A humorist can, and often does, tell jokes but that is not their stock and trade. A humorist is one who uses humor not for immediate laughs but is an artist with words, character development, timing, pauses, and the nuances of telling a story. A joke is hit and run. The whole point of a joke is to get a laugh and then move on to the next joke. That is the job of a comedian – but not a humorist. The joke is to humor what the microwave is to gourmet. It…

In 1988, IBM invested $10 million developing a project – Deep Thought – to create a rudimentary artificial intelligence program that could eventually beat a grand master at chess. The original program could calculate 720,000 moves per second. In 1993, the project’s name was changed to Deep Blue and on February 17, 1996 world chess champion Garry Kasparov played against Deep Blue and Kasparov won four out of six matches and took home $400,000 in prize money from IBM. One year later, Deep Blue successfully beat Kasparov and became the first computer system to beat a human world champion in a standard chess match. In a press conference afterwards Kasparov…

Several years ago I read an article using research to illustrate how the brain reacts to gain and loss. It seems the amount of pleasure we receive from a gain of $1000 is not equal to the amount of sadness we feel for a loss of the same amount. Our capacity for regret seems to outpace our capacity for happiness. In fact, it turns out that happiness is fairly transitory. Brian Christian in “The Alignment Problem” writes that one of our hormones for creating a sense of happiness – dopamine – plays games with us. While serotonin stabilizes our moods and feelings of well-being, dopamine sends a message to the…

By now, many of you have read the frequent articles and responses to the latest Pew Research showing the number of people who identify themselves as Christians is declining. Over the last seven years, that number has fallen 8 percent. While no one is surprised that the majority of the decline has been in mainline Protestant churches with evangelicals remaining relatively stable, there was a marked rise in the number of adults who indicate no religious affiliation— up 8 percent from 2007. In other words, there is either a significant numerical decline or people taking the poll simply fail to identify for whatever reasons with any particular religion. They may…

When my father became ill near the end of his life, he fought death as hard as anyone I knew – just as he had willed himself to overcome every other obstacle in his life. He often told us about his mother who would set chairs across the kitchen to hold her upright when she could no longer stand. She had drilled into him, “When nothing but your will says go.” As his physical condition deteriorated, my father’s will to beat death only grew stronger. His enormous spirit to persevere that had served him well for so long was not open to – or capable of – allowing him to…

It has become a tradition for us to publish a poem for the Christmas blog. So much Christmas poetry has either romanticized the day or, especially in modern poetry, found only despair and resignation. What I admire about this poem of Wendell Berry’s is his expectancy in the ordinary. It’s unfortunate that the word “mundane” has come to mean dull and lacking interest or describing something unremarkable because so much of Wendell Berry’s writing is about the mundane. It is about this world. The daily rounds of chores and long relationships. The routines and tasks that are uneventful – at least on the surface.  But that is both the setting…

Last week I wrote about the importance and also the difficulty of letting go. There comes a time when the founder or entrepreneur must turn loose of the tight grip on the venture or it will not survive. It will have the life choked out. But what happens when the time comes to step aside for good many years later? I’ve thought far more in the last several years about succession and the transition of leadership than I ever thought about starting organizations. In so many ways starting was easy. The ideas and the opportunities came and it was just a matter of acting on them. Knowing how to release…

For me, as someone having founded and co-founded several organizations, few things are more satisfying than spending time with men and women starting a company or non-profit. While most of the conversation is about start-up, I try to get around to the topic of what happens when it grows. One of the most useful tools for understanding the lifecycle of an organization is that developed by Dr. Ichak Adizes, the founder of the Adizes Institute. We all begin at the same place: an idea born in response to an opportunity. The new idea becomes an infant dependent on the resources of the founder and that stage may last months or…

He sat down, paused before he spoke and then said, “It’s too much for me to give thanks. I cannot be thankful for this. I will never be thankful for this.” He and his wife had lost their son and someone with the best of intentions had quoted Paul’s instructions to the church in Thessalonika, “Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus.” Then was not the time to say, “Paul did not say be thankful for everything – but thankful in everything.”  Yet, that is what I thought about for days afterwards. Paul says, literally, eucharisteo, in everything and in…