I’m currently visiting Montreal – the primarily French-speaking city where I was born and raised – and was having lunch today, enjoying excellent shawarma at a local Lebanese restaurant while tapping my foot to the beat of Arabic music when my mind started wandering…
We’ve all heard it said: “Good is good enough”, or “Leave well enough alone”. Those sayings convey a form of popular wisdom — the idea that there are times in life when aiming for a higher level of perfection can be counterproductive and that things should just be left the way they are. My native French has a very similar saying (“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”) loosely adapted from something that philosopher Montesquieu famously wrote three hundred years ago.
There are many different ways to look at commercial enterprises. If you purchase something from a company, you will tend to look at it from the standpoint of a customer. If you’re retired and living off your savings, you may look at the same organization from the standpoint of a small shareholder.
Transferable skills, as people usually think of them, are abilities developed in one context that can be readily applied in a different setting. You may, for instance, learn how to manage interpersonal conflicts as a camp counselor and leverage that skill later in life as a team leader.
I recently came across an article by David Brooks of the New York Times titled “The Strange Failure of the Educated Elite” in which the author draws a sharp contrast between a moral system based on individual achievement, on one hand, and one based on moral character, on the other:
I was exactly twenty-six years old when I was offered the most important piece of career advice I ever received. My wife and I had recently moved halfway across the country so that I could take up an assistant manager role in the training department of the company where I had been a field advisor for the previous two years.
We often hear about the poor state of financial literacy amongst young people, indeed across the population in general. It’s an issue that many people, organizations and governments are keenly interested in and one that the media takes an interest in from time to time.
I was participating in a division-wide virtual town hall recently during which employees had the opportunity to submit questions anonymously via sli.do. One of the first questions that got asked went something like this:
As a person and a leader, there are few things that I appreciate more than hearing someone say “Don’t worry Bernard, I’ve got this.” – knowing that the colleague speaking those words is reliable and will be taking care of things.
I was asked recently to provide some thoughts on what could be done to attract more women to the investment industry and, furthermore, into leadership roles.
It’s a complicated question. I’m keenly interested in the matter and have tried to educate myself about it, but I will be the first one to acknowledge that that’s not, as a man, a very strong position from which to weigh in.
I am extremely fortunate that life has put so many good role models on my path over the years. Whether professionally or otherwise, I clearly wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for the people who have, throughout my life, guided me along in one way or another.
The Inventor, in the beginning, devised an apparently benign contraption meant to disseminate information more effectively to specific people within specific facilities. Nobody anticipated what would come next.
