Dividends & interest: The pleasures and pains of writing this column

✍ Scribed by Craig Chappelow

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2005
• Weight: 44 KB
• Volume: 24
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1093-6092
• DOI: 10.1002/lia.1097

✦ Synopsis

O ver the course of five-plus years, I have written more than thirty Dividends & Interest columns for Leadership in Action. Recently, in a burst of end-of-the-year energy, I cleaned out and organized my column archives. While doing so I reread many of the columns, a process that turned out to be both enjoyable and agonizing. Some of the pieces seem thin in retrospect, but to me the single most satisfying thing about writing this column (or writing anything) is picking up a published piece a couple of years later and conceding that it was pretty good. This makes me a bit like Norm Abrams, the master carpenter on television's This Old House. Norm, after executing a task such as a complex and exacting dovetail joint, will look over the perfect, airtight result and say something like, "Well, that's not too bad."

LiA's editors give me a lot of leeway when it comes to subject matter. The only major requirement is that the content has to relate in some way to leadership-which in my view is not a limitation at all, because most everything relates in some way to leadership. The subject matter of my columns has covered a lot of ground, including computer users, 360-degree feedback, the airline industry, worklife balance, leading across cultures, and management lessons in movies.