Last week’s mail brought a Los Angeles County Superior Court Jury Summons by which I am ordered to be available in March for civil jury trials at the main civil courthouse in downtown Los Angeles ….in the middle of a pandemic. Needless to say, due to the surge of the [Read More]
Several weeks ago, The New York Times published an article about one of my favorite topics: Active Listening. Entitled “Practice Better Listening” by Kate Murphy,(Sunday, May 17, 2020, At Home section) the author notes that with life moving at a much slower pace these days, we have the opportunity and [Read More]
"A house divided against itself cannot stand." Abraham Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois, June 16,1858 Like most of you, I have been paying much attention to the protests by Black Lives Matter in response to the death of George Floyd ; as I write this, the protests have been occurring all over [Read More]
In its February 20, 2020 edition, The Economist published an article entitled, “Do not rely on Facial expressions for how people are feeling.” Noting that both Aristotle and Cicero believed that “...the face was a window onto a person’s mind”, the authors commented that more than 2000 years later, we [Read More]
An unknown author on the Harvard Negotiation PON Blog staff posted a blog on April 9, 2020 entitled “How Mood Affects Negotiators” which discusses “What …social psychologists [are] learning about the connections among emotions, negotiators and decision making.” (Id.) The blog post notes that researcher Jennifer S. Lerner of the [Read More]
I just finished reading a book entitled, Start With Why? By Simon Sinek (Penguin Group, New York, 2009) which posits a simple thesis on why some organizations are very successful and others are not. It all depends on whether they have maintained or lost their “why”- their vision, their cause, [Read More]
We are all facing a “new normal.” Most of us- over 75%- are working remotely from home trying to adapt very quickly and competently to this “new normal”. We are attempting to keep the same sense of structure and processes that we used in an office setting without much luck. [Read More]
During 2019, the California Legislature passed some interesting laws aimed at leveling the playing field on equality. The first law that caught my attention involves implicit bias. Several weeks ago, I posted a blog about the existence of implicit biases among Emergency Room physicians. The California Legislature was also aware [Read More]
