Description: Book review of 'Developing the Leader Within You'.

Description: The reviewer believes the actuary reading this book gets a modern, small company exposure to running a company and doing your work. 'It provides an insight into how the new generation of entrepreneurs are building their businesses and how we can successfully operate in them. We can use this book to gain new ideas about how to govern ourselves and run our teams to be successful and attractive in this new future.'

Description: The article describes principles for optimal sub-tasking of a project goal. Two experiments each one comparing different approaches are presented. A summary of principles for optimal goal setting presents seven key points: i)levels of outcome goals should be recognizable and lack ambiguity; ii) each subtask should be atomic, i.e. not be capable of being broken up into further subtasks, iii) the subtasks should be uniform, lacking ambiguity, so that any new trainee could master it without the need for further guidance; iv) each subtask should be attainable in a reasonable amount of time; v) mentor feedback should be provided during the initial stages of learning or training; vi) upon mastery of each subtask trainees should be encouraged to maximize their overall score; vii) after mastery of individual subtasks, while attempting to maximize scores, trainees should be provided with a mixture of easy, intermediate, and difficult tasks.

Description: Applying Agile Methodologies to Manage Work and Drive Value is intended as an overview of the SCRUM, Kanban, and Lean methods of managing work in constantly changing environments. The value it provides is to draw awareness to the various methods that exist when the goal is to perform work with agility. There are three main sources of information within this version: scrumalligance.org, kanban.university, and lean.org for reference.

Description: It is well established that empowerment of staff is a critical leadership trait. But what are the metrics to recognize that you have achieved it? What steps enable this achievement? Which psychological attributes explain its efficacy?This article proposes to answer these questions through a multi-disciplinary examination of empowerment in the context of three leadership domains.

Description: The 2016 Professionalism Ready-to-Go Kit is designed so that an experienced facilitator can use the materials to lead a session on professionalism. It is intended for actuaries at all levels of actuarial experience. The program is portable so it can be delivered anywhere (on the road). This Ready-to-Go Kit uses a case study to illustrate professionalism scenarios and to promote small and large group discussions.

Description: This article addresses dealing with distractions, avoiding habits like multi-tasking, and providing guidance on how to reach a state of "flow" to concentrate on deep work.