A Restaurant That Turned Racism Into a Brand American history gives us more examples than we would like to remember of Black people being humiliated, excluded, or treated as less than human in restaurants, hotels, theaters, transportation, and other public places. But few businesses made racist imagery as openly central to their identity as the
Coon Chicken Inn: A Restaurant Chain Built Around a Racist Caricature Read More »
The Real Question Is Who Owns What A great deal of modern success gets measured by titles, visibility, salary, access, and how much prestige somebody carries when they walk into a room. Somebody becomes president of a division, chief executive of a subsidiary, senior partner, general manager, head of a record label, or the public
Ownership, Power, and the Difference Between Having a Position and Owning the Asset Read More »
Healing Is About More Than What Happened There comes a time in life when simply being able to say, “I survived it,” is no longer enough. You can survive betrayal and still come out of it having a mighty hard time trusting anybody who comes afterward. You can survive abandonment and become so afraid of
Blessings Are Looking for You: Healing What Pain Changed Inside You Read More »
A Federal Workforce Program Many People Overlook One of the most useful employment programs in this country receives surprisingly little attention considering how much help it can provide to somebody trying to rebuild a career. The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, better known as WIOA, can help eligible workers obtain job training, education, career counseling,
The Difference Between Earning Well and Owning Well Many of us spend a good part of our working lives trying to figure out how to earn more money. We chase promotions, larger salaries, bonuses, impressive titles, and opportunities to work for companies whose names carry a little weight when we tell somebody where we work.
The Ownership Equation: Why Building Your Own Business Can Change the Meaning of Work Read More »
Interviews Are More Than Answering Questions Most people walk into a job interview prepared to answer whatever questions somebody sitting across the table might throw at them. They rehearse their experience, accomplishments, strengths, weaknesses, leadership stories, and all the reasons they believe they are right for the job. That preparation matters, but a strong interview
The Myth of Having to Choose People have a way of telling us that we need to pick one lane and stay in it, as though a human being can only be one kind of person at a time. Be disciplined or relaxed, ambitious or content, tough or compassionate, intensely focused or easygoing, but somehow
The Power of Contradiction: Why High Performers Refuse to Be Only One Thing Read More »
A Different Kind of Career Crisis For millions of baby boomers, those last working years were supposed to be fairly predictable after spending most of a lifetime building a career and preparing for retirement. They worked for decades, watched their salaries grow, put money aside, earned benefits, paid into Social Security, and figured they had
A Word With an Extraordinary History There is an old Greek word that traveled a mighty long road from everyday conversation into some of humanity’s deepest thinking about reason, creation, and God. That word is logos. Today, many of us recognize logos simply as “word,” especially from the famous opening of the Gospel of John:
Logos: How an Ordinary Greek Word Came to Describe the Order of the Universe Read More »
The Limits of External Qualifications When people start looking at somebody as a possible partner, we often begin with the things that are easiest to see. We notice the job, income, education, house, car, appearance, religion, social standing, and all those other signs that seem to tell us whether somebody has their life together. Those