You’re third in line for takeoff, finally ready to depart La Guardia and get to your lunch meeting in Chicago. The pilot comes on the P.A. for a last-minute cheery message: “Thanks for your patience. We hope to make it up one we’re in the air and get you to O’Hare on time. Or at least someplace not too far from there. We’re thinking maybe Gary or Indianapolis. As the President says, we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the essential. So wish us luck.”

What if that were acceptable? What if we never got where we were hoping to go, and it was okay?

What are the implications when President Obama tells us that part of his philosophy is, “We shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the essential?” Sounds reasonable, in a way. Don’t want to be a perfectionist about everything. Wouldn’t be realistic. Never get anything done. Got to compromise, make a deal. Make progress of some kind.

I’m not so sure about throwing the perfect overboard. Read more…

I don’t idealize a great many people that I’ve known, but Richard Maddy is an exception. A violin maker, legendary string instrument rebuilder, WWII paratrooper, and son of the founder of Interlochen Center for the Arts, I met Richard when we were both serving on the alumni board of the organization his father had founded. When the board would get bogged down in the minutiae and politics of whatever problem had wound its way around us, Richard was always there to remind us what we supposed to be doing. He would ask, in some form or another, “Is it good for the kids?” Read more…

  When the financial environment goes through a sudden and radical change, every person and every enterprise will go through an urgent rethinking, since anything and everything about the future that we once had reasonable expectations about is now open to question. Since the nature of a massive degraded environmental change is so complete and the future so unknown, many of us face change with a feeling of barely controllable panic. Read more…