Description: This article considers ways actuaries can meet the growing demands of senior executives by redefining their role and the actuarial operating model.

Description: The February/March 2016 edition of The Actuary magazine—the Society of Actuaries’ flagship publication.

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: This articles showcases the principles of effective servant leadership.

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: 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 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: 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.