Description: Six pointers about career advancement for actuaries, based on real life experiences from my 47 year career.

Description: This article lists the leadership qualities which made U.S. Grant, an under appreciated historical figure, so successful.

Description: Leadership inspiration essay asserting that the things that are the most valuable to us are also the things that we have to work the hardest for.

Description: This article introduces IT DevOps to actuaries and how it is applicable to them to improve their modeling efforts and make them more efficient.

Description: This article highlights the importance of communicating concisely and effectively through email and other written forums, and when/when not to use written vs. other forms of communication.

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: 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)