November 22, 1963 appeared to bring a typical afternoon of easy-listening music at University of South Carolina radio station WUSC where I was a student announcer my sophomore year. Typical until… bulletin-announcing bells clanged on the gray-green UPI teletype that printed news non-stop. They’d never rung so insistently in my limited experience: sounding like a […]

Potpourri: You Are Not Your Mind – The Late Jim Farr: Self-help Some people we meet change us and, for me, Jim Farr was one. Beyond the loss to his family, leadership expert Jim Farr’s death in 2000 sent a wave of sadness through hundreds of his disciples, including me. He altered the way we think and […]

Potpourri: Vote Intelligently – But How?: Politics Now that the election is over, I am as confused as ever about how to vote intelligently: as baffled as I was 20 years ago. In 1984 I was a journalist covering the then-titanic political battle between Sen. Jesse Helms and Gov. Jim Hunt to win Helms’ U.S. Senate seat. […]

Potpourri: Using the Internet to Change Lives As Well As Business: Self-help News item: Boeing will help restore a World War II-era B-29 bomber. It would become only the second flightworthy Superfortress left in the world. Personal item: My father died in a B-29 six weeks before I was born. Now – because of the Internet – […]

Potpourri: Tsunami – And What Are You Doing With Your Life?: In America with our freedom and independent spirit we believe we can control our fate. Through resourcefulness and drive we can accomplish almost anything. That belief has propelled me. At a personal crossroads about 15 years ago someone suggested that I listen to Brian Tracy’s […]

Potpourri: Tim Russert: His legacy: A guidepost in life through death Written at the time of Tim’s death in 2008… A hope: the life of NBC’s Tim Russert gives current and aspiring reporters a model for how to work in an infotainment world prizing gotcha questions, story-hyping, position-taking, yelling, and winning at any cost.  His death triggered […]

Potpourri: The Death of a Leadership Program?: In America, white males don’t think often about being white males. Conversely, white females never forget their sex, African-American males are continuously aware of their blackness, and African-American females think constantly about both their race and gender. How do I know? The late Reverend Charles King, a respected, blunt […]

Potpourri: The Beatles in Retrospect: Personal Re-mastered albums and Rock Band have put the Beatles atop Amazon.com almost 40 years after their demise. From this college disc jockey and amateur band member who watched the era unfold, reminiscences for those who experienced the Beatles then and the many who like them now: Early 1960’s.  They seem no big […]

Potpourri: Taking the Entrepreneurial Leap At 50: Self-help When I was in my mid-forties ­I feared the best of my life was in the past. But circumstances coupled with a long-held desire to control my own life fueled a passionate desire to recreate my world and start a successful new business. I did. Starting over at 50 […]

Potpourri: Surviving Starting Your Own Business: Self-help If you want to survive starting your own business, consider the survival savvy of long distance runners. This came to me after I congratulated a now-successful neighbor who created his own homebuilding company two years ago. (He graciously thanked me for encouraging him to persist during the frightening early months. […]