Description: Latest installment of a series applying lessons from Buddhist philosophy to the working world of actuaries. This installment focuses on practicing the yogic principle of "ahimsa" or non-harming with ourselves, and the importance of respecting and caring for oneself in order to better serve the needs of others.

Description: A real-life situation is posed involving a management, leadership, or other business decision, and readers are invited to submit their responses to "What Would You Do?" This issue’s case study found amid-career actuary uprooting his family for a new job that involved promotion to Chief Actuary. Shortly after, he found that the company was in serious financial difficulty, and he felt he'd been deceived during the interview process.

Description: A real life situation is posed involving a management, leadership, or other business decision, and readers are invited to submit their responses to "What Would You Do?" This case study involved an actuary interviewing a candidate who seemed exceptional, until she started pushing back on the job level.

Description: Interview with the current Chair of the Retirement Section Council, describing the work of the Council and other topics.

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: 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: Christine Hofbeck began her actuarial career in retirement consulting, but after a few decades, a few practice areas, a bestselling book and a stint on a reality television show, she found herself in the world of reinsurance. Reinsurance News talked with her to learn more about her background, her advice to other actuaries, and her outlook on the future of the profession.

Description: Leadership lessons for actuaries. Insights into what Asset Intensive Reinsurance is all about.

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: The newsletter outlines the book selected for the book club discussion and summarizes the discussions held during the book club meeting.