The King of Redding
t was a spectacular sight, sitting high on a hill over the quiet little town of Redding, lit up by a hundred acetylene lamps in the night—an Italian villa in which the equally luminous Mark Twain, known and loved around the world, held court in his last days. MORE
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Snow Job
So far this year Ridgefield has had 237 inches of snow, which is the equivalent of ... let’s see, 237 divided by 12 ... 144 feet of snow, 10 million pellets of pet-friendly ice melt — should we call it “pelt”? — or 5,280 diagnoses of Seasonal Affective Disorder.
It’s just sad.
So volunteer psychologists riding with snowplow drivers have been encouraging borderline residents to blame everything on their mothers. MORE
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Summertime and the Living is EZ
As summer befell, or approached – I’m too lazy to look up the date – our quaint, bucolic, New Englandly-like town, everything just sort of stopped. MORE
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Managing the Unthinkable
"I was trying to figure out who was alive. I'm in a meeting in London, and somebody bursts in, and we all huddle around TVs. 'That's my building,' I'm thinking. My office was in One World Trade Center, the 40th floor. I can't get anybody on the phone. Everybody there was heading toward the stairwells.
"I couldn't get anybody on mobile phones, either. Blackberries were working, so we started getting e-mails. I called one of our guys in Jersey City (N.J.), a guy who works for me. Our facility there looked right across the Hudson River at the World Trade Center. While I'm on the phone with him, he starts screaming—he had just watched the other plane fly into the second tower. And I was watching it on TV. It was weird and horrible." MORE
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The Hockey Puck
If we who frame words for executives and organizations can learn to see through the eyes of the people we wish to persuade, if we can address their aspirations -- “skate where the puck is going” -- we can discover what motivates them, and nourish it. That may well change what we think of them and what we want to say. It will definitely improve our effectiveness in saying it. We will have become partners in the destiny they imagine. We will have joined with them in the story in which they see their lives. MORE
Terry A. Kirkpatrick
