Musings

Ben Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” No leader worth their weight in annual reports would fail to prepare, right? Most of us spend a significant portion of our time in one form of preparation/planning or another. I heard a slightly different take on an old story recently—the story about…

Don’t judge me. I was watching House, the show about the antisocial maverick doctor who specializes in diagnostic medicine. The episode was about a woman who was experiencing Abulia (pronounced ah-bool-ya) which is a mental illness associated with the inability to act decisively. It is a clinical lack of willpower. I often watch TV or a…

I saw The 1975 in concert last week. They weren’t in my hometown, so the adventure included driving eight hours, attending the concert, getting a few hours of sleep, then driving eight hours back before I emceed an event the evening following the concert—all with my two college age boys and two of their friends.…

What do mental health, etiquette, and the isoperimetric problem have in common? If you guessed “a circle”, you are right, but I kind of gave away the answer in the title. How do you enclose the most ground with the least fence? That’s the isoperimetric problem, which is to determine a plane figure of the largest…

The Tamarisk tree, First Americans, and Elzéard Bouffier. When seemingly unrelated things have a connection, it means I’m supposed to be paying attention. Four hundred years, seven generations, or a single lifetime. These are all long periods of time—long enough that it is hard to keep in view the changes that will occur. In church…

This musing is an abbreviated version of my keynote at last week’s RECON23, the Annual Leadership Conference of The Kimmell Foundation. Make plans now to attend RECON24 on October 18, 2024. When I was young, I loved fire, explosions, and engineering—the “knowing how stuff works” thing. So, naturally, I got interested in model rockets. There…

When I speak at events, I like to move around. Recently, I was speaking, and when I walked around in front of the podium, the sound system started making a horrible, ear-splitting whine. That’s feedback. The word first came into use in 1909 when Nobel laureate Karl Ferdinand Braun used the term as a noun…

If cars were more dangerous, we would drive more safely. At least that is what Gordon Tullock postulated in his famous thought experiment which became known as “Tullock’s Spike.” Tullock suggested that if we were serious about reducing car related casualties, we should install a spike in the center of the steering wheel of all…

Anyone who knows me knows I am an Oklahoma State Cowboys fan. As our alma mater says, I am “loyal and true.” Singing that along with more than 50,000 other Cowboys Saturday night, then watching our beloved team fall to the visitors, reminded me what it means to be loyal and true. Loyalty is often…

I recently rewatched the 1956 film, Forbidden Planet. The first time I saw this movie as a young boy, Robbie, the robot, would have been my favorite character if not for the appearance of Anne Francis. Anyway, Robbie was the amazing result of genesis futuristic science and technology, including AI and matter synthesis and generation, all…