Description: At the 2004 Annual Meeting, four industry leaders, David Atkinson, Patricia Guinn, Bruce Nicholson, and Salim Manzar, shared their insight on a variety of questions. This article briefly covers their responses to a few of those questions.

Description: In this article, corporate culture expert, S. Chris Edmonds, is interviewed. Chris is an author, speaker and consultant on creating corporate cultures that are based on values alignment and high performance. In addition to sharing Chris' expertise with the actuarial community, the goal of this article is to also get actuaries to think about their leadership beyond the confines of technical expertise and leading a team.

Description: Servant Leadership is a leadership philosophy that focuses on organizational success through serving and enriching the lives of the employees. As employees become engaged the organization becomes more vibrant, sustainable and successful. Four primary principles are discussed: Create an Environment for Employee Growth; Provide Employees What the Need to Thrive; Remove Obstacles to Employee Achievement; Help Employees Reach Organizational and Personal Goals. Trust, creativity, shared vision, listening, job skills and personal attention lift employees up, creating high quality, engaged employees that help drive organizational success and create a pool from which the next generation of leaders for the company will emerge.

Description: Is your development team or IT staff growing tired of last-minute requests to include additional functionality? Have you strained to explain challenging actuarial topics to non-actuarial staff for implementation? Do your teams find themselves revisiting deadlines & timelines when building solutions? During this interactive panel discussion, three technologists (two software engineering managers and one data scientist) along with three actuaries will discuss real world problems and approaches using experience from previous projects. Although the challenge of running efficient software teams is not unique to actuarial science, this webcast will discuss best practices on how to organize teams to reduce friction and context switching. Presenters will also explore unique actuarial challenges and concepts including how to address standards on data quality when building software, how to build intuitive software that meets actuarial standards and how test-driven development makes it easier to meet actuarial standards of practice.

Description: This discussion is about the pros and cons for smaller companies to affiliate or tie in with casualty carriers.

Description: Provides one perspective on how to address the age-old sales/actuarial product-development question about how much marketing thinks will be sold vs. how much in sales is needed to begin to make a profit.

Description: The SOA is making significant strides in addressing members’ and candidates’ needs in Asia and Latin America through an atmosphere of collaboration and goodwill.

Description: This article discusses the need for more coordination and consistency in assumption setting between the pricing actuary, illustration actuary, appointed actuary, and financial reporting actuary.

Description: This article is a book review of First Things First: A Principle-Centered Approach to Time and Life Management, by Stephen R. Covey and Roger A. Merrill. Rather than focusing on efficiency that is based on time and things, the book emphasizes effectiveness , with relationships and results as the foundation.

Description: Vision and objectives and projects for the International Section.