Description: Actuaries must be able to present compelling arguments to win over their audience. For the first time, they may be managing a staff looking for direction, making recommendations to senior leaders, or trying to persuade non-actuarial colleagues who see the world differently. This series of articles is intended to educate young actuarial professionals on key business influencing skills that will be beneficial in the near term as well as throughout their careers. Part 1 is focused on leading and influencing a team.

Description: A compilation of reader responses is presented to a real life situation posed involving a management, leadership, or other business decision. This issue’s case study involved management hiring someone to make changes, then ignoring all suggestions.

Description: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is more than just sexual farces and fart jokes. In the Tale of Melibee, Chaucer imparts wisdom on choosing advisors, soliciting advice, and judging advice. This is informed by Chaucer's experience as a royal official, as well as his great education.

Description: Writing tips for actuaries – skipping the usual guidelines you get in most books on writing. They represent a half century of personal successes and failures.

Description: This article summarizes the issue of good control over internal meetings, identifies some symptoms to watch for and identifies tangible actions that can be taken to bring control over financial resources being invested in meetings.

Description: Tips for effective communication globally.

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.

Description: Predictive modeling is a powerful toolset for assumption setting (mortality, lapse, etc.). The multivariate approach has its advantages in handling high-dimensional data, address correlations, and statistical significance. However, building insurance assumptions is far more than a simple modeling practice. One must take care to address how the model is applied and its business implications. This session will share the learnings from multiple projects.

Description: Leadership Inspiration contest entry that focuses on how life events and our reaction to them teach and motivate us all to be better leaders.

Description: The author shares four practices for becoming more effective at giving employee feedback.