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Last month, I spoke about my selection as a contender for the Board of Governors of the Society of Actuaries. After going through various stages of selection, I eventually made it to the final list of twelve contenders from whom the voting members of the SOA would elect someone. At this stage, I stepped back for a moment to think about how, as a virtually unknown candidate, I stood very little chance of winning this election unless I made an effort to campaign in some manner. So, I decided to try my luck at canvassing for votes or, at the very least, making myself known to the voting population of the SOA. To this end, as I personally know very few SOA members, I approached the Board and as...

Every successful organization needs to grow and evolve in order to sustain the vibrancy and character that made it a success in the first place. When no growth takes place, the result is stagnation and ultimate death. If you choose not to stagnate, the tough competition that exists in every aspect of business today makes it imperative to grow and evolve to maintain an edge. Growth reflects the strength of the organization. It is a testament to the value being provided to its clients—if the organization did not want to provide value, it would not grow. Advantages of Growth Most companies have three types of stakeholders: owners, customers, and employees. For the former, when there&rsq...

Everyone talks about ‘toxic managers’, defined as those managers who are difficult to work for, who are bad for employee morale, who bully and put people down, who take credit for others’ work,… This type of manager is considered toxic to the employees and the organization he or she works for. But have you stopped to consider the other type of damaging manager? The one who is ostensibly popular and dynamic? His team is productive, it gets good scores on engagement surveys, but somewhere, something is not quite right. Although this manager is apparently good at what he does, some of the things he does are insidiously eroding the structure of the organization he works...

I often extol the necessity for constant learning. Here’s how this can help you open up a lot of free time. Most of us use a computer in the course of work. Even if your job does not entail this per se, you still need the computer to communicate with others. Most of us tend to learn the bare basics of the program (say, MS Word) that we need to get by. But MS-Word has so many features that, once learned, can actually help streamline your work to a huge extent, and save you a lot of time. For example, suppose you want to rearrange paragraphs in a document. Instead of highlighting each paragraph and then dragging it to where you want it to go, or cutting and pasting it, you can use an inb...