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Last week I told you about my birthday cakes and fireworks, but over time, my birthday parties have changed. Now my favorite thing for a birthday party is to go to the bookstore and wander the bookshelves and see what I can find. So Friday, we went on a Bookstore Crawl. It’s not as mellifluous as…

My red-headed uncle kept telling his red-headed sister, my mom, that she would have a red-headed child on the Fourth of July. He was close. I was born at 5:30 a.m. on the fifth of July meaning this is my birthday week. Because I was almost born on the 4th of July, most of my birthday parties…

As you might remember, I have a goal to move thirty minutes every day. Occasionally, I do laps around the house for half an hour, but my preference is to walk outside around the neighborhood. At this time of year, that means I have to get up early enough to beat the sun. I don’t…

There’s a part of me that thinks being an investigative reporter would have been a wonderful career. I’m probably dogged enough. I like sorting out puzzles and learning about new things. However, I didn’t have the nerve to ask the tough questions until later in my career, so I wouldn’t have made it very far in…

One of my first workshops when I started consulting on my own was on the topic of the intergenerational workplace. I found and used a book called The Remix: How to Lead and Succeed in the Multigenerational Workplace by Lindsey Pollack (2019). I’ve written about it in the newsletter before. She has a chapter on…

It’s unexpected but I’m immersed in softball lately. I blame Suzanne, the administrative assistant I worked with at OU. She’s an all-year OU softball fan, not merely a championship fan, and her enthusiasm for the players and team got me involved. I watched some of last year’s Women’s World Series and all of this year’s…

On Monday, in his blog*, Seth Godin used two phrases that caught my attention. The title was the newsletter heading, “The hubris of creativity.” The second phrase was near the end of his short post, “Generous creativity is the only way things can get better.” If you search on the second phrase, you’ll find a…

“‘Leadership’ is a concept we often resist. It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are made for community, then leadership is everyone’s vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community,…

Things have changed since I left, but when I was at UTSA, we had five graduation ceremonies in the Convocation Center (the basketball arena). The processional order was students, faculty, then the platform party. I was in the platform party, usually seated front row, stage left. Our line of faculty and campus leaders was in position…

1986-87 was a busy year on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin – that’s what’s known as an understatement. I had told Sharon Justice the Dean of Students I was interested in the opportunity to learn new things in this position. We were only three weeks into the semester and I was…