Description: To provide high level information on a book selected and discussed during the December book club session, The Ten Commandments of Risk Leadership. In addition, this article serves as a promotion of the SOA book club as well as the upcoming sessions.

Description: Latest in series of articles exploring the adaptation of Buddhist philosophy to actuarial practice. This installment examines the challenges for actuaries in dealing with pain points in actuarial work, and how to best manage these forces so that the work remains aligned with professional standards.

Description: In this real life case study, an actuarial candidate tried to get the hiring manager to increase the level of the position for which she was interviewing. Did that raise red flags about her candidacy? A compilation of reader responses is presented, along with what actually happened.

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: A compilation of reader responses is presented to a real life situation posed involving a management, leadership, or other business decision. This case study involved an actuary who felt he had been lied to during the interview, but only found out after he moved his family and started the job. What should he do?

Description: Article presents the basic terminology and theory of attribution theory, the theory explaining the causes that people attribute their successes and failures to. The article reviews i) typical attributions(e.g. effort, luck), ii) dimensions of attribution (controllability, stability), iii) useful and non-useful attributions, and iv) attribution retraining and v) other aspects of the theory (such as accompanying emotions)

Description: This article is the result of the Leadership & Development book club on Dare Lead. The article talks about major themes in the book and relates them to other podcasts and authors thought on those themes.

Description: Read how to combine people management and mentorship to create positive and open environments and improve employee engagement and productivity.

Description: This is the second installment of a two-part series. Part I was published in the July 2023 issue of The Stepping Stone and provided guidance on how a new (re)insurance company can build an attractive work environment for actuarial talent. In part II we will focus on how to encourage those actuaries to remain with the company in the long run.

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.