Description: The author provides strategies for orchestrating your words which in turn will help orchestrate our attitude. The words you repeat are gradually convincing your mind that these statements are true therefore, precluding your mind’s eye from seeing any possibility to prove your words wrong.

Description: How to resolve and prevent conflicts in business.

Description: An invitation to the readers of CompAct to enter a fiction writing contest.

Description: Chair’s letter introduces the new section leadership.

Description: Customers, quality and efficiency are the three key components to successful reports. This article explores those components as well as technology and product knowledge and details how to create successful reports.

Description: Two members of the exam writing/grading committees for Group Health share 10 tips about improving students' chances of passing the CSP and DP exams. In general, students should focus more on reading and understanding the material than on memorizing lists.

Description: Successful communications cannot be achieved simply by expressing an idea.How ideas are communicated can make or break a practice. This article gives eight steps to improve comunications within and without the practice.

Description: In “Gearing up for Designing Your Future,” published in the May 2017 issue of Actuary of the Future, the author cited four heroes as his personal inspiration. This article is the successor, showing the glory of these heroes and how they can inspire us actuaries today, as we strive to live our best lives. Identifying your own Noble Purpose as an actuary and in your life makes creating a five-year plan for personal growth meaningful and motivating. What will you gain from reading biographies of famous people and the classics? To aspire, to approach eloquence, to emulate the poetry of how they put their ideas across to mobilize their publics, to elevate our own characters by their examples, to be fully equipped to make moral and ethical judgments, to master the primary tool, verbal communication.

Description: An application of GLM trees to mortality modeling using the Individual Life Experience Committee 2009-2015 dataset. GLM trees are a hybrid of GLMs and decision trees which are analogous to the way actuaries have analyzed data. The major benefits include speeding up actuarial analytic workflows, improving data understanding, and improving data visualization.

Description: Note from Editor introducing the articles in this issue.