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LeaderFOCUS is in its 5th Calendar Year
Archives for Year 2001 (53 issues)
Archives for Year 2000 (52 issues)
Archives for Year 1999 (17 issues)
Archives for Year 2002 -
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| December 30, 2002 |
It is, I suppose, intended to be a commentary on our era when TIME Magazine comes to the end of 2002 and names three Persons of the Year, commending them all as “Whistle Blowers.” The role the three played in a year of turmoil and upheaval, seems on the surface an odd distinction. Generally, we do not elevate the snitch, the stooge, the tattle-tale, to the status of national hero. Most of us consider the informer to be something less than admirable. He/she is a traitor. A turncoat. He consorts with the enemy. He seems more worthy of condemnation than praise. But 2002 was an unusual year. |
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| December 23, 2002 |
With so much money and manpower (person-power) and technology and resource devoted to the accumulation and dissemination of news, one would expect there to be a just a tad more diversity among the news outlets. But as we approach the end of yet another year, more than ever, our national psyche is informed by a global network of news organizations who all appear to be covering the same story. |
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| December 16, 2002 |
For several generations now, a goodly number of college seniors have discovered J.D. Salinger. Kevin delivered a copy of Franny and Zooey (a collection of short stories by Salinger) recently and said, “Dad this is a book you’ll like. It’s a quick read. I couldn’t put it down,” he explained. “When you’re done, let’s talk about it.” |
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| December 9, 2002 |
It’s common to ask this week, “Can you BELIEVE it’s December already?” We ask the same question every year about this time. Maybe it’s a bit more startling this year because Thanksgiving was relatively late in November. We had a little more time in November to prepare for the long Thanksgiving weekend last month. But that means less time for Christmas. |
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| December 2, 2002 |
One of the best benefits of family gatherings on holidays like Thanksgiving is the opportunity for extended conversation. I guess it’s possible, even on Thanksgiving, for such interaction to be thwarted. The children are demanding. The television set blaring. Certain of the family dominate, effectively blocking out others in the quest to be heard, or even noticed for that matter. So, in some cases, many families gather for a few hours of noisy bantering and then everyone packs up and heads home. We try to make it more than that. |
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| November 25, 2002 |
The Second World War was the big event of history just before I was born. My parents were in High School as Pearl Harbor suffered that early Sunday morning surprise attack on December 7, 1941. |
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| November 18, 2002 |
When I got home late Friday, I tossed my travel gear on the bedroom floor, ready to shed my clothes and hit the sack. But just before I hit the pillow, I decided I’d go ‘head and unload my suitcase. So I fumbled for the zipper in the darkness, pulled it around the top, flipped back the flap and looked inside. |
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| November 11, 2002 |
When Southern California gets a first rain, you’d think it was a first snow. It’s been months since we’ve enjoyed a good soaker. The grit and dust and oil accumulates on the highways and freeways for months at a time, and when the rain falls the roads can be slick as ice. Californians only know one speed limit – ten miles an hour over whatever is posted. Rain and fog (for that matter) don’t slow anyone down. Not around here. |
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| November 4, 2002 |
It’s no secret. There is something in the male DNA that responds to the lure of the battlefield. It certainly isn’t exclusive to the male gender; women can be as competitive and prone to violent confrontation as men, no doubt. But it is surely typical for the male of the species to rev up at the invitation to participate in a physical duel of just about any sort; where winners and losers are labeled as such by the end of the day. |
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| October 28, 2002 |
To this day, in the nightstand beside my bed, at the bottom of the drawer, stowed away under a stack of long since forgotten issues of TIME and PC World Magazines, lies a little piece of technology representative of our new age of throw away electronic gadgetry. It is now a corpse, pronounced dead a long time ago. |
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| October 21, 2002 |
It’s time to tell you a little about my Mom. She’s arrived at a new milestone. This week. Let’s just call it three quarters of a century. Yes, that’s relatively young, considering my age. She was barely twenty when I was born. I don’t think she’ll mind me telling you. She and I have grown up together. |
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| October 14, 2002 |
The dome can be seen for miles. It has become something of a landmark for me. Coming home from Orange County south on the inland Interstate, I can see the white dot on a mountain top, and it tells me I’m nearly home. |
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| October 7, 2002 |
In a room with about thirty of the top producers in my business, I came away with an unavoidable observation. Most every one of them has retained the services of a personal coach. A coach plays something of a mentoring role, but it’s more intense. The purpose of the relationship has a narrower focus. A mentor sets the pace for the whole of life. A business coach is more a personal trainer – like the one retained to prepare an Olympic hopeful. |
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| September 30, 2002 |
We pulled into Cincinnati after nine-thirty on Monday night this week. It’s a big, old city. Like time warp for me, reminiscent of the days I lived in the heart of Chicago decades ago. |
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| September 23, 2002 |
Is it just me… or is there contradiction in the air? On the one hand, there are those who seem to think that if only the government agencies responsible for such things had at the time gone public with the information it now appears they possessed, the terrible tragedy in New York one year ago may well have been prevented. We didn’t take what we knew seriously enough, they say. |
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| September 16, 2002 |
When Tom and Rita Hanks sat in the front row for a one-woman comedy show in Toronto, created and performed by local comedienne Nia Vardalos, they weren’t prepared for the out-of-control side-splitting laughter that blindsided them, and everyone else in the room. |
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| September 9, 2002 |
When Joy Shepard retired after more than thirty years in the classroom as a high school math teacher, she spent a year relaxing. At age fifty-nine, she needed it. She earned it. Education is demanding. She felt a freedom she’d never known. But it only took about nine months before she got restless. |
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| September 2, 2002 |
I sometimes wonder if the old tradition of civil dialogue between opposing parties exists any more. Whatever happened to Roberts Rules of Order? |
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| August 26, 2002 |
It’s been nearly two hundred years since the two now famous explorers ventured up the mighty Missouri River on a mission inspired by President Thomas Jefferson. We will be hearing a lot about their exploits in the coming months. It’s the Bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. |
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| August 19, 2002 |
My brother and I finally got in a round of golf. To pull it off (in view of the demands of family and office), we teed off early. The summer marine layer, early morning fog, thicker than usual, filled the valleys making visibility difficult that day. |
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| August 12, 2002 |
Two of our three children are school teachers. They’re good, too. They like their students. They care about kids. They listen. They laugh easily. They celebrate the children’s successes and achievements. They notice when a child picks up a new skill, or breaks through to a new level of understanding, or simply “gets it.” They are winsome and playful, and do the things good teachers do, without fanfare or applause, day in and day out. |
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| August 5, 2002 |
Mr. Dunton was my high school Mr. Holland (as in Mr. Holland’s Opus). “Mr. D.” we called him. Every day, Mr. D. sat behind an upright piano banging out melodies and harmonies until we teenagers got it right. In a gravelly voice, raspy from too many years’ pushing high school kids into vocal self-awareness, he hit the pitch squarely, nailing the timing and proper annunciation, together now, think diction, articulation, light on the “T” and the “S,” he’d holler, support from the diaphragm (he’d inflate his big barrel chest, and push up against his abdomen with two wide open palms for effect), and we’d fill the room with rich melodious sound. |
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| July 29, 2002 |
There may be nothing more painful for a parent than to watch his or her child flounder, unwilling to engage life, lost in the world of classroom study, confused about vocation, unmotivated on the job, cynical about friendship. It’s the kind of disconnect that pierces the heart of parenthood. |
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| July 22, 2002 |
What is it like to be the best in the world? I’ll never know, really. I can only guess. But sometimes, you can wake up thinking you’re in pretty good position to take it all home, and then the bottom falls out. No one is exempt. |
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| July 15, 2002 |
Parenting is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter, really, how many books you’ve read or how intentional you’ve been in preparing yourself for the task. It’s not a matter of IQ or street smarts. When you become a parent, you will soon realize that it’s the most demanding role you’ll ever play. There will be times when, exhausted, you feel entirely unqualified. Like you need to go back to school to get a Masters Degree in Parenting, anything to fill in the gaps, regroup, and give it another go. Or maybe no go at all. You are looking for a way of escape. |
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| July 8, 2002 |
As a schoolboy, I remember Presidential rankings. There was the youngest President. The oldest President. We knew the Presidents by their number in sequence (Eisenhower was the thirty-fourth). It seemed terribly subjective even then, but in those days we also ranked the Presidents in order of greatness. |
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| July 1, 2002 |
Certain phrases survive the centuries. Some of them millennia. I suppose the survival rate for a sentence or a phrase would be a function of truthfulness. If the words pack a verbal punch, and teach something universal, something that rings true, it will be repeated again and again, generation after generation. It can even develop a life of its own. |
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| June 24, 2002 |
When they all sat down for the reading of the will, just under a billion dollars was hanging in the balance. The room was full of hopeful heirs and their attorneys representing the grandchildren and the string of wives. There were five of those. The deceased passed on in 1976. It took six years and an army of accountants and attorneys to sort out assets and liabilities. He owned a complicated collection of businesses and real estate holdings. The potential heirs expected that the final settlement would result in a comfortable retirement. The attorneys, too. |
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| June 17, 2002 |
What do you do with the Shaq phenomena? Where do you find someone big enough, experienced enough, powerful enough to overcome the gentle giant? It has been and will be a long, expensive search. |
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| June 10, 2002 |
At this stage, my peers tell me I’m not alone. Short term memory seems to be more and more a problem. Maybe it’s information overload – how much data can one human brain store, organize, and then retrieve? Maybe given enough time the wires fray, lose their capacity for conductivity, or maybe the connections just loosen up. Maybe it’s weariness; or brittleness; or lack of oxygen. Whatever the cause, sometimes I simply can’t remember what I did just a little while back. |
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| June 3, 2002 |
The United States of America was not the first to capitalize on the symbolic power of the Eagle. The bird’s magnificence was recognized in early Roman mythology associating the powerful bird with the deity Jupiter. Later, the Romans, the French, the Russians, the Germans and the Hungarians (among others) attached their national identity to the hawkish and fierce bird of prey; long before the Revolutionary War. |
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| May 27, 2002 |
Jasmine’s mom is a housekeeper. Her dad left a long time ago. He preferred his alcohol to his family, and back when he was around, he was abusive. Her parents moved to Los Estados Unidos from Guatemala when Jasmine was just five months old. That was eleven years ago. Jasmine, the youngest of the three children has two older brothers. In a relatively short time, all three became completely Americanized. |
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| May 20, 2002 |
There will always be tension between those who focus on language and those who focus on action. Language, in speech and in writing, is a process. It is time consuming. It is also satisfying. Action, in work and in deeds, is also a process. It, too, consumes time. And action, like language, brings its own kind of satisfaction. One may be preferred over the other. The two rarely co-exist. Except in the garden. |
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| May 13, 2002 |
It’s the season for Pomp and Circumstance, and those predictable speeches that many people find intolerable. To them, the platitudes and the clichés and the formalities are hollow and pointless. But graduation day is a milestone, and is far more significant that most of the participants realize. |
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| May 6, 2002 |
The kids are home this weekend. All three of them. They’ve become adults. Two of them are married now. On those rare evenings when they are together, the chattering begins in the entryway, and doesn’t end, really, until the door is pulled shut and the engine starts and they head out the driveway for home. |
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| April 29, 2002 |
Dr. Ron Rietveld was a teenager when he stumbled across an old discarded photograph of a man in a coffin. The quality and condition of the aging picture was poor; grainy and dog-eared. He found it in an old castaway chest. |
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| April 22, 2002 |
The Wall Street Journal announced this week, after fourteen interesting years: the Dart Board will officially be retired. |
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| April 15, 2002 |
When I spoke to Judy by telephone on Monday, I could tell, her breathing was labored. She was glad to hear from me, she said. She asked about my family. We chatted some about the progress of her illness and the goodness of God’s presence and how it won’t be long before I can get over there and we can spend some time just talking, just like before. |
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| April 8, 2002 |
As we drove through the pleasant valley at sunset, one of our favorite places on all of planet Earth, remembering the day with our daughter by the waterfall, Carolyn and I were blissfully unaware would happen on that same road later that same night. |
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| April 1, 2002 |
A rather common mid-fifties gift under the Christmas tree when I was a kid was the “Paint by Number” kit. It included genuine oil paints, maybe twelve to twenty colors or more depending on the price tag and level of complexity in a colored box with a couple of long slender artist brushes and a container with enough thinner to clean your brush and move on to the next numbered hue, fill in the shape, stay inside the lines. |
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| March 25, 2002 |
One of life’s great mysteries is the existence of what I’ve been taught to call the “soul.” In my upbringing, the soul distinguishes human beings from the other creatures wandering around the planet and under the surface of the waters. All living organisms possess spirit. The life force. But only humans possess a soul. |
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| March 18, 2002 |
Last summer, two young French film-makers took an interest in the New York Fire Department, Engine 7 Ladder 1. The theme of their story focused on the “coming of age” aspect of life in the heart of the city as a firefighter. |
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| March 11, 2002 |
Gordon MacKenzie spent thirty of his most productive years at Hallmark Cards, “When you care enough to give the very best.” During those years, he emerged as a creative force, not only producing a prodigious collection of verse and commercial design, but also as a teacher and mentor and motivator to other artists. He believed in the possibility of working within a large corporate structure and tapping into one’s creative capacities all at the same time. A novel concept. |
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| March 4, 2002 |
“The Media,” as it is commonly labeled, is hardly the monolithic force some claim it to be. It has been popular among some to suggest that The Media is controlled by a certain segment of society and it is a most effective tool in shaping public opinion in a certain pre-determined way, so that the outcome benefits The Conspiracy and those who Design it. |
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| February 25, 2002 |
When my long time friend Ron told me that the Olympic Games just might be held in his home town, it was a prospect that held some serious economic ramifications… he’s a real estate broker in Park City. |
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| February 18, 2002 |
Maybe it’s just me. There is nothing scientific about it. It can’t be measured or tested. But ever since that watershed day in our shared national history - September 11, 2001 - there appears to be a new civility reigning over the global village. |
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| February 11, 2002 |
The Olympic Torch is lit. Let the games begin. Salt Lake City threw a party. A spectacle worthy of the name. The theme, “Light the Fire Within,” embodied by a twelve year old boy, a local hockey player, searched for the flame which would ignite the Olympic ideal. As the night progressed, fire became a clear and suitable metaphor for the spark that drives the entire Olympic movement. |
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| February 4, 2002 |
Well designed structures give substance to ideas and form to values. The best of them make a clear statement about their purpose. It’s called architecture. Our congregation is ready for a building of our own. We've found one. It's a fixer-upper. |
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| January 28, 2002 |
There is a fine line that separates genius from madness. That line is not easy to identify. Some of the most innovative minds dance right along that line, stepping across into the Twilight Zone then retreating back into sanity, some with easy grace, others with heart wrenching and tragic consequences. |
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| January 21, 2002 |
I remember the Sunday I preached a sermon on the Old Testament story. I was twenty-something at the time. Young. Not a whole lot of credibility with those weather-worn veteran saints. I’d read a bunch of commentaries and dictionaries in preparation. But in spite of all my homework, I was still troubled by the story and unsure about how to approach it from the pulpit. |
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| January 14, 2002 |
Something happens when you become a member. It means that you’ve reached the place where you are willing to say openly that you identify with the Group, their Purpose, their Values, their Meeting Times and you want to become a part of the Association. |
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| January 7, 2002 |
To suggest that Jack, as a turn-of-the-previous-century Belfast child, was bookish would be a considerable understatement. His mother and younger brother Warren spent their days exploring the pages of their extensive library in search of adventure and ideas. Their conversations were lively. The boys soaked in their mother’s boundless curiosity. |
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