With bourbon production up 435% in the last two decades, the state of Kentucky has a lot to be pleased with. Distillers are building rickhouses as fast as they can. Companies specializing in building rickhouses are backed up. Distillers who once claimed all local grains now claim to be able to source local grains as the local growers are simply unable to raise enough to meet even a single distillery’s grain needs. That is good news for corn, wheat and barley growers across the country. It is great for local jobs. The downstream implications of the increase of bourbon sales [...]

In “The Coming Reckoning,” we explored how the United States is fracturing and how that fracturing may be delayed or averted. However desirable it may be to many, perhaps most Americans, that the country remain united, a path towards dissolution appears as a possible avenue ahead of us. While there are countless voices predicting a coming civil war, that future is highly improbable. Frankly, you’d need parties that were really interested in that sort of a conflict and we don’t have that today in America. But we do have a deeply divided society and there are possible Troubles ahead which, [...]

At a recent Sunday family gathering, a young extended family member was telling of his apprenticeship as an electrician. Six months out of high school, being paid to work and learn the trade, he will test out of his second year of apprenticeship in another 6 months and be a certified journeyman. His firm wants very much to keep him. Another firm started by his first mentor wants to hire him away. The general contractor on the major project he’s working on already comes to him for questions instead of his nominal supervisor. This young man is learning skills that [...]

Back in January of 2020 we wrote a piece on What to Expect in 2030. The piece still holds up, I think. As far as general predictions go, these are not particularly bold, but they are interesting and not widely written about. But there is one more prediction that we ought to make and then wait 8 years to see how accurately it plays out. Namely that as a consequence of the other predictions in the original 2020 article, namely persistent surveillance, shrinking middle class and global demographic changes, there will be a move by an initially small, but growing [...]

The promises of the information revolution and Third Wave of society ushered in an era of competition and lower prices on an entire range of goods by globalizing the manufacture of products and the democratization of services. This revolution enabled people around the world to participate in the global chain of service and supply. By globalizing production and services, prices fell in the West while standards of living improved dramatically across the globe. US companies took a leap on Chinese manufacturers and the massive increase in global shipping to move suppliers from US companies to Chinese, which offered prices low [...]

We've discussed in the past on these pages the importance of clear, concise and well, considered objectives in order to have a goal for strategies to achieve. We've discussed the myriad pitfalls leaders struggle with from inability to define their vision and objectives, to the lack of discipline required to see the planning process through to the emotions that get in the way when the person they love needs to be let go and replaced with someone who can do the job better than their family member or close friend. Those are the issues that leaders need to confront first [...]

I’ve been reading a lot lately on certain social media accounts about how modernity is better than “the old days” and also about how much better things were back in “the age of chivalry.” I totally get what advocates are saying from both perspectives. I’m not entirely sure those advocates are representing their arguments well. What's usually missing in most discussions about modernity and antiquity is natural consequences not of technology but human nature. Modernists tend to overlook the fact that ancient people's figured out how to mine and mix copper with tin or zinc to make bronze and brass, [...]

We’ve written about Why We Don’t See It Coming in the past. Very often we are not even aware of how far off we are. A billion is not just more than a million. It is 1000 times more. So when we talk about specific topics and issues, it is important to be precise if we’re to be taken seriously. So that’s what we will do here. We will look at the power production disaster in Texas from this month with an eye to what we can learn for the future. We will look at what happened. What they system [...]

Colleagues, my latest article appears at the Vital Masculinity Project, who asked me to write about crisis leadership for their journal. I hope you enjoy the article. In any crisis, people in the middle of the crisis almost desperately seek out those who keep their heads about them to be near in the hopes of getting through the crisis. That is a truth of human nature. It is also a truth that the people of any organization know without having to ponder who the leaders are that they can count. Ideally, that person is the titular leader of the organization. [...]

The first week of January, 1994, I found myself walking slowly through the Capitol Rotunda with my friend, Bob Gorman. Bob was a small town newspaper editor going through DC, and since I was about to move away, we met for a leisurely walk through the nation’s Capitol building, as one could do back then. We commented on the two statues each state sent to Statuary Hall, and how two Western States, Hawaii and California, each sent a statue of a missionary priest (Father Damian of Molokai and Father Junipero Serra who helped establish the chain of missions on the [...]

This article was written for Ad Otium, a very good web project and blog, and for whom I am very grateful for the opportunity to write. Please visit this site and read his articles and links. It starts with a heartfelt and seemingly innocuous comment, “I wanna do what you’re doing.” There is so much back story to that one sentence. So many assumptions. So much abstract. So little practicality. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. All endeavors need a starting point. Finding someone you’d like to emulate is as good a place as any to start. But, man, [...]

In "The Secret of the Unicorn Tapestries," (The Paris Review) Danielle Oteri heartens those of us who seek contemporary examples of excellent prose, historical accuracy and evidence, connecting ideas in seemingly disparate fields, and a sleuthing tenacity found in Chesterton's Father Brown. This article ought to be assigned reading for half a dozen graduate programs outside the art world, from political theory, to history, to sociology, to critical thinking and methodology. All in a single essay. If you're a business leader, read this article and take the challenge to see if you can tie the lessons of this piece to [...]

By Tom Ruby and Scott Bethel It seems to us that the United States is hurtling down a road that forks in the near distance into two roads. The fork on the left leads to civil war. The fork on the right leads to autocracy. We missed the exit for the pluralistic civil society that our constitution offers and that we have been moving towards with necessary course corrections since the country’s founding. The fork that lies ahead will destroy, at least temporarily the social and progress gains that have been made and are being made today. We urge leaders [...]

Business and civic leaders are working their way through perhaps the most tumultuous year of their careers. A global pandemic, an election year and civil unrest. Yet you don't have the time nor the bandwidth to feel sorry for yourselves, so you go to it and work the issues critical to your job. That's how it ought to be. Like everyone, leaders have an idea of how they'd like the world to be and how things ought to work, but you don't pretend that the situation is something other than it is. If so, you wouldn't have made it to [...]

Over the past several years I've asked a lot of people in relaxed conversations what their red lines are. In nearly every case, my conversation companion is taken aback by the question. The concept of red lines isn't something they think about. But here's the rub for every one of us. We all have red lines in nearly every aspect of life. And those red lines bring necessary consequences. So lets talk about what red lines are and then what the implications of those red lines mean to your business and life. Then we'll close with some practical recommendations for [...]

Here are some related thoughts on our current crises. I'm feeling more pessimistic about our country's future than any point in my adult life. I'm not talking about some snowflake angst. I've deployed to combat zones 3 times and have dealt with the pressure of human lives and national security issues my entire adult life. This crisis worries me because my children have another 30-40 years of adult working life and my grandchildren have entire lives to live. So here are some things that I think are real issues that many people either aren't aware of or aren't considering fully. [...]

by Tom Ruby and Scott Bethel We're now half a year into the Covid-19 Pandemic. So much has changed and so many experts have missed the performance or integrity cut that few people can be certain they have confidence in what is real and what isn't. Now is the time for business and government leaders to assess whether we are on the path to make it through the pandemic healthy or whether we're about to fly into a mountain. And its foggy. And turbulent. Murky and unstable air ahead. Let's reassess this together. The focus of what we are talking [...]

This Coronavirus pandemic has interrupted individual lives and communal national lives to a degree unseen by younger generations in their lives. Older generations who lived through WWII are nearing the end of their lives and their memories  of their lives during that time are fleeting. That means this pandemic is genuinely a new experience for whole populations. It was not just the flu. It was real. And it did damage to the economy that will take a long time to recover from. There have been no end to predictions about what will happen and how lives will change forever. I [...]

Pretty much everyone has tired of the novelty of Zoom meetings and Zoom Happy Hours. And yet we can be assured that we will be conducting core office meetings electronically beyond the foreseeable future. Even after the Covid-19 pandemic is a memory, the effects will linger in the form of working from home and drastically reduced office space. In the mean time, companies will have to fulfill their annual employee training requirements. This is the time to change your old training routine and go from the same soul-crushing training to something that will actually move the company in a new [...]

Excellent piece in The Atlantic, "Why The Coronavirus Is So Confusing." It gets back to a previous post on the Equation which discusses how to deal with situations in which there are lots of variables. We people are not very good at considering the interaction between multiple causal variables working at the same time. Here are a few key points from The Atlantic article: 1. "It seems unlikely that a random bat virus should somehow jump into a susceptible human. But when you consider millions of people, in regular contact with millions of bats, which carry tens of thousands of [...]

If the Coronavirus pandemic has taught us anything, it is the importance of evidence in decision-making. Facts abound in the world. Most are irrelevant to any particular issue. But being unaware of the facts relevant to your organizational situation blinds you as a leader. I encourage all senior leaders, especially CEOs and Board members to strongly consider establishing a Chief Analyst in your organization. A month ago I wrote about what was happening with Coronavirus and how the pandemic was not like the flu, traffic accidents or other seemingly similar causes of death, such as child drownings in backyard pools. [...]

With time comes clarity. That is the case with much that happens in life. So it is with the Coronavirus. Not with the science of how the virus infects people. That is known. But with how it moves from person to person before they show symptoms, how long it can remain on surfaces, how far it spreads through the air, all is becoming more clear over time. That is good in and of itself. There is another area in which time offers clarity. We're learning every day how much people are willing to take in terms of isolation. We're learning [...]