Category Archives: Trust

On Workplace Depersonalization

I have been think­ing a lot late­ly about work­place deper­son­al­iza­tion. Let me give you a cou­ple of exam­ples. True sto­ries. I go for a doc­tor’s appoint­ment and am sit­ting in the wait­ing area while oth­ers check in. One of the recep­tion­ists says to an old­er, incom­ing patient: “Oh, hel­lo! It’s so nice to see you! […]

Awkward Leadership

Among the many emo­tions asso­ci­at­ed with lead­ing oth­ers, one is hard­ly men­tioned: awk­ward­ness. And yet, time and again, the places where things can change are in the awk­ward moments, made up of social dis­com­fort, impre­cise words and ten­sions that we hope some­times too des­per­ate­ly are on their way to being over­come.  We can think of […]

On Not Wanting to Know

I attend­ed a con­fer­ence late­ly on open sci­ence where one of the speak­ers dis­cussed how we can now cre­ate detailed human genet­ic pro­files. For exam­ple, it is pos­si­ble to give a preg­nant woman or a new mom knowl­edge of all the dis­eases to which her baby might be sus­cep­ti­ble. But, it turns out, there’s a […]

Leadership and Beauty

A recent New York Times arti­cle, “How Beau­ty is Mak­ing Sci­en­tists Rethink Evo­lu­tion,” caught my eye and ear. Fer­ris Jabr’s lucid prose verges at the end of the arti­cle to poet­ry and is framed through­out with exquis­ite images of bird feath­ers by Ken­ji Aoki. The con­tent of the arti­cle is about evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy and scientific […]