Op Eds and Milwaukee Life

Mayor Stay Puft Just Doesn’t get It

November 11, 2007

When one of our daughters was a teenager, we often found ourselves at the bottom of the stairs, needing to leave and late again as she continued to apply the lotions and creams essential to her well-being. We listened to the whirring of the hair dryer with growing frustration, and at last one of us [...]

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Privacy: an op ed rant

April 7, 2007

Privacy? Never again. Our option? As Scott McNeeley of Sun Microsystems said years ago, “Get over it.” A good friend, a well known information security expert, was asked this morning whether or not one can still do something to have privacy. He said, “When people who are serious ask me what to do to prevent [...]

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Refusing to Age Gracefully: The New Frontier

March 29, 2007

Mid-life issues, I learned from twenty years of professional ministry and my own life experience, are as predictable as those of adolescence. When they emerge, it doesn’t always mean a crisis but it does generally mean that a passage is under way. Carl Jung illuminated the midlife passage by describing the process of individuation. During [...]

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Entitlement and Empire

March 7, 2007

A few of us silverbacks were sitting around the coffee shop talking about the newest generation. Someone mentioned the sense of entitlement we hear about these days, how they were raised to think that one opinion was equal to another, that everyone should be making a hundred thousand dollars a few years out of college, [...]

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Bipolar Disorder: an op ed rant

March 1, 2007

No, I don’t mean the condition we used to call manic depression. I mean the compulsion of television news programs to divide every issue into yin and yang, for and against, two often arbitrary but always oppositional positions that polarize a discussion. This method of “delivering issues” creates a false aura of importance, requiring opponents [...]

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Branding Milwaukee

March 1, 2007

The Milwaukee 7 and their supporters and allies are struggling to give birth to a new vision for Milwaukee and South-east Wisconsin. They are getting it almost right … but “almost” doesn’t win a cigar. They are trying too hard to turn what isn’t into what is and what is into what isn’t. The Milwaukee [...]

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UFOs Over Wisconsin: an op ed rant

February 11, 2007

“Space travel is utter bilge.” – The Royal Astronomer in England, 1956, the year before the launch of Sputnik The local CBS news (Channel 5/58) had a feature this week on UFOs over Wisconsin. It was different than the usual silly <wink wink> kind of feature that passes for UFO news on most mainstream media. [...]

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Is a Police State a Local Matter? an op ed rant

February 2, 2007

One of the questions raised by a blog like this is, how local is local? Is local restricted to stories about the Slowy Slowertons in Whitefish Bay moving through molasses to frame a plan at last for responding to the Bayshore Town Center? When concentric circles of interest intersect – Fox Point, Wisconsin, the Midwest, [...]

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A Dead Father Speaks to his Son

November 29, 2006

In sixteen years of professional ministry and subsequently as a consultant and speaker, I concluded that three things are needed for organizations to be effective:  mutuality, feedback, and accountability. The absence of any one skews behaviors in predictable directions. Mutuality means real cooperation, real teamwork. Feedback means loops both inside and to the outside of [...]

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Get a Move On, Milwaukee

April 30, 2006

Get a move on, Milwaukee! By RICHARD THIEME Posted: April 29, 2006 Icame to Milwaukee in 1987 as the head pastor of a downtown church. In my sermon at the installation service, I named two issues that I believed were critical to Milwaukee’s future, economically and spiritually – race relations and the kinds of jobs [...]

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A Modest Proposal

October 25, 2005

The battle over a new stadium is unsettling to everyone. Most of us know about this event because the media give it so much coverage. This is only appropriate. During a week when the Israeli Prime Minister warns of the likelihood of nuclear terrorism, mass graves are uncovered in the Balkans, and economic data reminds [...]

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Will Wisconsin decide to compete in the 21st century?

June 24, 2005

Will Wisconsin decide to compete in 21st century? The Business Journal of Milwaukee – June 24, 2005 by Richard Thieme How many psychiatrists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Just one, says the old joke, but the lightbulb has to really want to be changed. The same is true for Wisconsin in the [...]

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Persons of Conscience and the Laws of Robotics

March 12, 2005

Persons of Conscience and the Laws of Robotics by Richard Thieme The Three Laws of Robotics I have been listening a lot lately to persons of conscience. What do I mean by “persons of conscience?” Let’s take a cue from Jeffrey Wigand. Wigand, made famous by the film The Insider, is the man who called [...]

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Betting on the Boomers

March 11, 2005

We’re living longer and longer, but we still treat boomers as if they’re busted. It takes society a while to catch up with itself. One thing changes – and it might be a really big thing – but institutions with deeply ingrained habits don’t see that they’re out of step … until the gap widens [...]

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New Mugs at Stone Creek Coffee – The Simple Pleasures of the Poor

January 7, 2004

from the Stone Creek coffee newsletter … New Mugs at Stone Creek Coffee – The Simple pleasures of the Poor “Wow! just FEEL that!” Not used to such enthusiasm from my wife about holding a hot cup of coffee, I looked at her hands cupped around the new Stone Creek coffee mugs. Her fingers moved [...]

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Human Nature Doesn’t Stop at the State Line

December 15, 2003

“It’s different in Wisconsin” The first time I heard that was as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during a political science course. I had lived until then in Chicago and when I raised issues based on my experience with the Richard J. Daley machine, the instructor laughed at my naiveté and spoke of [...]

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A Suburban Curmudgeon and the Empty Nest Condo

November 28, 2003

Suburban curmudgeon and the empty nest condo copyright 2003 The Business Journal of Milwaukee – November 28, 2003 When my family moved to Milwaukee 16 years ago with four children still in school, the five-bedroom brick colonial we found in Fox Point made sense. But, one by one, the kids left, and their bedrooms became [...]

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Going the Distance (after 9/11)

October 30, 2001

Americans tend to be sprinters.  Hair-trigger reflexes at the ready, we wait at the line for the gun, and when it comes, we shoot out of the blocks and burn it up. The wars we fought in the Gulf, in Panama, Somalia, Grenada, were sprints. We broke that tape and returned to our homes. Now [...]

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The Spirit of Success

May 2, 1997

The Spirit of Success Books on spirituality and business are flooding the marketplace. Why? The boomers, the biggest market in history, are in midlife. They’re asking hard questions and looking for answers. Their questions — how do my values relate to making a living? How can I balance life’s practical demands with the urgency of [...]

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Life in the Electronic Fortress

April 12, 1997

Life in the Electronic Fortress published in the Small Business Times (Milwaukee WI) Innocents Abroad I received a telephone call recently from a young friend. Marcus (not his real name) was excited. Marcus lives and works in Tokyo, where he spends his days breaking into electronic bank accounts. then moving the money into hidden accounts. [...]

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