Pensights

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[...]

Organizations are built on processes (or at least should be) – they are a system of interconnected tasks, activities, and routines that guide employees (or technology) through decisions and procedures that produce products, services, or programs that are of value to customers or stakeholders.  Simply put, organizations are a set of methods to get valuable[...]

So this month’s column was to be about gratitude, in the spirit of Thanksgiving.  And it still is.  But an article on gratitude seemed somewhat cliché, overly simplified, and quite honestly, a bit insensitive given the circumstances.  The pandemic continues to rage – accelerate, to be more accurate.  I know many of you reading this[...]

Winning is relative.  The Dodgers just won the World Series: they didn’t need to be better than then 1906 Cubs (which had a .763 winning percentage, the best of all time), but just better than the Tampa Bay Rays in a seven-game series. What defines success is based on circumstances: what’s considered achieving excellence in[...]