Dan Erwin

The Flip Side of Happiness

Too much of a good thing can backfire. And that, research reveals, includes happiness. It’s intriguing to find significant research explaining the downside of emotions. Not least because I’ve always been intrigued with the upside of bad emotions and the downside of good emotions. Anger, for example, has an upside. And, in a never forgotten experience with a client, paranoia—at least for a lawyer—can have an upside too.

American culture is all about the pursuit of happiness. We’ve institutionalized that pursuit in the Declaration of Independence. But we understand the governmental caveats to that pursuit to assume also that we don't do anything illegal or violate the rights of others.

Still, I’m not a happiness-hater. Normally I have more than my fair share of happiness...

Lifelong Learning for Lifelong Employability

What’s the best way to go about business learning and stay abreast of constant change and new developments? In the February issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, Beth Davies and colleagues go beyond my question and focus on learning for lifelong employability. They set up their conclusions by distinguishing between the skills people have and the actual skills companies need. Then, of course, they add artificial intelligence into the mix, making for an absolutely superb analysis of human competitive advantage and the tools necessary for lifelong learning.

Their analysis of the necessary tools for adult learning (andragogy) covers the most salient issues from learning research.

1. Relationships help in learning by stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system conserves energy, slows the heart rate and lowers the blood pressure particularly after fight or flight responses. But under the pressure of business learning, relationships stimulate this “calming down” system, enabling people to process new ideas and learn more effectively than when working alone.Largely, I’ve found, it was because of traditionally competitive relations that only began to break down in the 1980s and ‘90s. In spite of the hullaballoo about AI, I’ll bet the majority of organizations are still in the middle ages regarding learning and development—except, that is, for technology groups...

Plainly Corrupt or "Legally" Corrupt?

Recently a delightful, young Middle Eastern couple and their small children moved into my apartment building. Like a number of new residents, they are exceptionally well educated. He, for example has a PhD in health economics from an American University. Both worked for a few years at well-known Silicon Valley corporations, but are here for further education.

Knowing my background, the young man and I sat down to talk about some linguistic rules. He was searching for day care for his younger daughter and wanted to know what he could and couldn’t say in an interview. And how best to find out whether a given school center would be best for his daughter. It’s rare for an international to ask about linguistic rules, so his questions of me were not only unusual, but especially astute.

After I laid out some protocols and suggested several different ways to gain as much information as possible for his decision, we got to talking about...

Walking in the Snow Like a Penguin

Tom Sacco shot me this cartoon, reminding me that walk like a penguin also needs to be added to walking in winter.

Thanks again, Tom.

How to Walk Safely in the Winter

I would never have thought about this except that one of our new apartment residents is from Louisiana. She’s terrified about driving in the snow and ice and just as frightened by walking. But I found her response to Minnesota winter just hilarious. Her brother recently flew in from Louisiana, landing on one of the coldest days thus far—minus 25 degrees—told her that she needed to come home. “Minnesota is uninhabitable. Why would anyone want to live in this country?” I gave her a few suggestions about how to walk in the winter--and especially how to deal with driving when you're sliding around.

For those of you, like me, who enjoy winter and snow and like to take an occasional outdoor walk, here are a few tips for safe walking.

--Dress in layers. At 20 below I’m comfortable in a t-shirt, regular shirt, hoodie and my lightweight Patagonia winter coat with hood. Some of my friends wear longies underneath their pants along with warmly lined boots, but I’ve never found them necessary.

--Cover your extremities. If it’s below zero, you may want a warm mask or big scarf to cover your face..

Functional Vs. Dysfunctional Anger

Over the years I’ve met with clients and business people who were resistant to working with a colleague because he or she was an “angry asshole.” But when I analyzed their statement by talking to other colleagues, I found that so-called “angry” people were a very mixed bag. Their anger differed significantly. It took me awhile to figure out that some anger served a useful purpose and some did not. But that the differences are rarely clear to most people. What I learned was that it was often helpful and enlightening to push back on “useful” anger, but that I was liable to get burned by another person’s anger.

Intuitively, I could usually figure out the anger that was being displayed, knowing whether to charge ahead or back off. Furthermore, in my seminary studies (1960) I had stumbled across a very insightful statement by St. Thomas Aquinas: “Without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable and crimes unchecked.” That single statement had caused me to rethink..

The Impeachment Process Is Worthwhile--Even If the Senate Refuses to Impeach

Though this historical review of the impeachment process won’t be published until the March edition of the Atlantic, all of its subscribers received a copy of Yoni Applebaum’s intriguing study a full month early. Applebaum, the senior editor for politics at the Atlantic, has all the right credentials—if that matters to you--including Columbia, a Brandeis PhD and teaching at Harvard. Obviously, an attempt to get the public thinking, I noticed a number of reviews of the study just a day after its publishing.

Because of the fiasco with Clinton, many legislators are wary of moving to impeachment. But the real worth of Applebaum’s review is to limit Trump’s power. From the initial pages of the review, Applebaum argues that the most serious charge is the attack upon the “bedrock of American democracy.”

Here then, are the five arguments Applebaum lays out in support of impeachment...

So the President is a MotherF**ker??

On several occasions I've written about swearing and rhetoric as well as about expletive naming. In a recent article, Emma Byrne adds to my ideas by writing about the "scientific case for calling the president a motherf*cker."   Byrne especially likes the Rep. Rashida Tlaib's remark, noting that she used the swear word in rhetorically correct fashion.  As Byrne writes, rhetoric reveals that this kind of language signals trust and a sense of belonging--and it also "fosters closeness and suggests a greater degree of authenticity."

Tlaib's swearing differs significantly from Trump's graphic description of sexual advances and his assault of women. While Trump's language intensifies feelings of disgust and revulsion, Tlaib's language has an instinct for the power of words and and the feelings of her colleagues and constituency. There's a sense of comeuppance in her language. It just feels good to say what she's saying about him.

One of the more intriguing insights that Byrne brings to her book on swearing is the distinction, the shit-fuck ratio, of these two swear words. "Shit" is inevitably negative, and  I'm aware of only one positive use of the term, a use that I've never heard except from my Methodist Grandmother Butterworth. She was born and raised in Arkansas and settled in Western Kentucky, spending most of her life as the widowed owner of a tobacco farm. Her world was late 19th and first half of the twentieth century. She used it to refer to me when I said or did something that was "smart alecky." In a positive, and humorous comment--and with a smile--she'd call me "a little shit." I understood it as a high compliment.

2018 Was a Banner Year for Algorithmic Prediction

Harvard’s Jill Lepore, one of the most fascinating and actually humorous historical writers, has superb explanatory insight on algorithmic prediction. That’s not a surprise. She approaches history from perspectives that have never crossed this historian’s mind--and does it with a lot of verve. She’s one of the few with a steady hand when the rest of us are lurching around with churning stomachs about artificial intelligence and moronic politicians.

With two algorithmic geniuses in my own family, a son-in-law and a recently minted CMU data-scientist grandson, with whom I spent an hour listening and trying to make sense of their conversation over Christmas, Lepore is an absolute delight at algorithmic explanation. 

She regularly seems to have the ability to...

Thomas Jefferson vs. Antonin Scalia: an Immaculate Misconception

When a case comes to me, I don't do whatever I feel like doing. I have a standard. That standard is what would the people at the time the Constitution was enacted have said.

    --Antonin Scalia, Speech at the University of Fribourg, March 8, 2008

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.