Going the Distance

I brought a chocolate sheet cake to work the other day.  I’d asked for an “outer space” theme for the decoration, and the cake decorator at my favorite bakery didn’t disappoint.  There was a quarter moon, and a sky full of stars, and even the planet Earth in blue and green frosting, showing the Western Hemisphere side of things.

The reason for the celebration was to mark the ten-year anniversary of my joining the staff of the Sheboygan District Attorney’s office as a state prosecutor.

The “outer space” theme was to mark the fact that in those ten years, I’ve driven more than 130,000 miles back and forth from home to office.  If you look that up, you’ll find it’s more than half the distance from the earth to the moon.

Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “going the distance”!  

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What Causes People to Be Successful in Their Careers? Part IV: Effective Speech Making—Word Choice, Style, and Language Sophistication

Throughout these blogs, we have been asking the question: What causes people to be successful in their careers? The answer we provided was the achievement of people skills. We showed evidence of this position through research from leading universities. This research showed that much more than half of job success comes from people skills. We also noted that much of what we call people skills is effective communication.

Communication as a Premier People Skill

In our first blog, we used the model developed by Robert Bolton in People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts to show that certain attitudes support a person’s successful efforts at effective communication, attitudes that produce good relationships before formal communication even starts. These attitudes are genuineness, respect, and empathy.[1] We will refer to this paradigm as the “Bolton Model.”  

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Assume We Have a Can Opener

There’s an interesting article by Jim Manzi in the most recent issue of the City Journal. In it, he addresses the weaknesses of empirical research in the social sciences, a problem he attributes to the greater “causal density” of questions concerning human behavior. Because of he complexity and number of potential causes for an outcome, it is extremely difficult to conduct randomized field trials that isolate the cause to be tested.

 Manzi begins his article by referring back to the debate about the stimulus package. Noting that Nobel laureates lined up on both sides of the question, he writes that “[f]ierce debates can be found in frontier areas of all the sciences, of course, but this was as if, on the night before the Apollo moon launch, half of the world’s Nobel laureates in physics were asserting that rockets couldn’t reach the moon and the other half were saying that they could.” The only thing that could be said for sure about the stimulus is that, however it turned out, “several Nobelists would be wrong about it.”

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