What is excellence?  Seriously, what does it mean to be excellent at anything – at a sport; at an artistic endeavor; in business?  Excellence is a tough thing to define – kind of “I’ll know it when I see it” type thing. Merriam Webster says excellence “is the quality of being outstanding or extremely good,” [...]

[Our Back to the Future trivia results are at the end of my column, including announcing the winner of a free ticket to PENworks 2021!  Read on!] So my daughter finished her summer internship last week – an office job in an accounting/finance department of a midsize business, and her first “real job” outside of [...]

It’s summer. So this month’s column will be a little more whimsical than normal, focusing on the themes and hidden meanings of the 80s classic trilogy Back to the Future.  Why in the world a 36-year-old movie?!  Well, after 16 months of constant challenges, we all greatly desire to move forward to a better, brighter [...]

Last weekend was Father’s Day, so in honor of, my wife and two kids were going to treat me to a brunch – nothing noteworthy (although emerging from pandemic, any visit to a restaurant these days is noteworthy).  We tried one of our favorite places in south Minneapolis, but found a sign on the door [...]

This is the first year in PEN’s 34-year history without a budget.  Probably like many of you reading this, our normal process is a board planning retreat every October, followed by the creation and approval of a plan and budget in November-December.  But last November-December was literally the height of the pandemic in the US, [...]

Never waste a good crisis.  Winston Churchill was credited in first using that phrase toward the end of World War II, and there’s some real wisdom in the statement: if you’re experiencing challenging times, you might as well learn and benefit from them to emerge stronger “on the other side.”  After all, life’s biggest lessons [...]

It’s not often that I re-run an article (and it’s certainly not often that I rerun it within the same year).  But the events of this month – the beginning of Derek Chauvin’s trial and the mass killing in Atlanta that targeted Asian Americans – along with a continued and growing recognition from business leaders [...]

So last week I was in the grocery store (which, like many or most of us these days, represents the extraverted highlight of my week), and I overheard a young kid – maybe four or five years old – ask, who I assume was his mother, if he could get some cookies.  She said no, [...]

So last week we learned that the COVID-19 variant first discovered in the UK may, in fact, be more deadly than the original virus.  (Don’t worry: this article is not about the pandemic.)  I’m not a virologist, but to me, this is simply the virus mutating to try to sustain itself – to spread more [...]