Personal Development
High School Students Can’t Go Wrong With Serving Others
High school seniors, and juniors should be filled with a mixture of anticipation, excitement and anxiety as they think about what lies ahead of them. As they decide which college to attend or job to seek, some students already know which career paths they want to follow and many others...
Moral Leadership Outlook: An Interview With Doug Gross
The first blog post on my site, besides "About My Blog", is titled "Leadership Matters For A Changing World". In it, I quote James Davidson Hunter's book, To Change The World. My new video interview series has taken inspiration from it as, I believe, it deserves much more thought from...
On the Importance of Travel
For many families, summer is the time when the car is packed, coolers are filled with sandwiches and drinks, and the entire clan squeezes into the vehicle to travel. In this part of the country, many families travel west to see Mt. Rushmore, the Rockies, Yellowstone Park or the Pacific...
Lessons from a Seattle Fishmonger
About fifteen years ago, a book titled Fish! A Proven Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results took the country by storm. Like most books of its kind, it was light on specifics but important inasmuch as it began to focus attention on the importance of organizational culture. As I...
All Day Today
The world recently lost a good man. His name is Rev. Kenneth Bailey, Th.D. Dr. Bailey was a Professor of New Testament. He spent most of his career in the Middle East. He taught at the Near Eastern School of Theology in Beirut, Lebanon, and had a peculiar lens through...
An Empowerment-Oriented Spirit
I conducted an experiment during my senior year of college titled The Effects of Positive and Negative Feedback on a Select Population of Group Home Residents. While I was going to school, I worked at a home for at-risk adolescents. These children came from all walks of life: from a...
Accountability
ac-count-a-ble (1) required or expected to justify actions or decisions; responsible: government must be accountable to its citizens. See note at re-sponsible. ac-count-a-bil-i-ty/n. It is impossible to lead other people without internalizing the virtue of accountability. Of...
Authenticity
Those of you who read this blog but aren’t from Iowa may not realize that we have been in a Presidential election cycle for nearly a year. Because Iowa is the first state in the nation to hold a Presidential primary—what we know as a caucus—we have been inundated with...
“Some Luck” by Jane Smiley
First, a primer about Iowa culture. Culture and Iowa aren’t necessarily concepts that fit together for most people. When I asked one well-known presidential candidate his impression about our state he commented, “The corn. The corn. I can’t get over how nearly every field for miles on end is filled...
Poverty
Over the next several months, in addition to the topic of leadership, I’ll be writing about several topics that require the very best that leaders have to offer within what James Davison Hunter calls in To Change the World our “sphere of influence.” The first topic that I want to...
