Is it enough for leaders to be competent, honest, and principled? Or is something more needed, even if that something comes at the expense of competence, honesty, and principles? That’s a central question for people like me who are interested in both “what” gets done and “how” it gets done. Usually, this question is framed […]

If the #stampoftheday posts were like the Miller Analogies Test, I might have started today’s post by asking “George Washington Carver is to peanuts as Horace Mann is to what?” The answer would have been something like “education” though “schools” also would have been acceptable. That’s because Horace Mann, who is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday,

How would you feel, if a web page on your “impact and legacy” read something like this: “Coffee-table history books depict [your name here] as a lightweight puppet of political party bosses. S/he is often viewed as little more than a ‘human iceberg’ who sleepwalked through [insert your job here]. We are told that while

“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” may be the one of the most famous lines in American history. These are the words, of course, that Alexander Graham Bell supposedly said on the first time he successfully used his newly invented telephone on March 10, 1876. Thinking about the call and Bell –

Believe it or not, an overweight general known as “Old Fuss and Feathers” who was pushed aside at the start of the Civil War and who also was in the word’s of one reviewer, “a lousy writer,” whose “memoir disappoints in a number of ways,” is the focus of today’s #stampoftheday. Winfield Scott, who was

Last fall, after Judge Am Amy Coney Barrett promised to “apply the law as it is written” and leave policy decisions to the other branches of government, Stephen Budiansky wrote a letter that was published in the New York Times. “If that’s all judges need to do, we’d have no need for judges.” Budiansky, author