Blog Archives

One Bad Apple

On a recent road trip through Georgia, I stopped at an orchard store outside of Ellijay. Among my purchases was a half bushel of apples I couldn’t resist buying. They were this year’s crop and delicious. About a week later as I was selecting apples to make my Mom’s honey apple cake,

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Never Now

A colleague recently introduced me to the concept of the “Never Now” list.

This consists of the items on your to-do list that you never get to. It is the list of projects that you know deep down you won’t complete, yet you rationalize you will….someday. Unfortunately, this is a someday that rarely comes.

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Faking Engagement

One of the realities of working is that, at some point in your career, you will be in a job you hate.

Sometimes, it is a job you can’t leave. At least not immediately. As much as you may fantasize about it, you can’t say, “Take this job and shove it.”

Yet simply surviving is often not enough.

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Avoiding Obfuscation

Obfuscation is one of those interesting words that sounds like it means – to make obscure.

Obfuscation is often associated with excessive wordiness and the use of technical jargon that is meaningful to “insiders” but not to others.

Obfuscation is almost synonymous with politics. It has become so commonplace that it is often hard to determine the actual truth.

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Telling “The Truth”

One of the ethical principles everyone knows is “Tell the Truth.”

Easy to say, often hard to do.

It is even difficult to know what “the truth” is in some cases.

Most of us mean to tell the truth but we may not always accomplish this.

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Banning Christmas – The Power of Safety Myths

I am a big fan of PolitiFact and MythBusters.

PolitiFact is an independent fact-checking journalism website. It is a division of my local newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times. MythBusters is a television program on the Discovery Channel. The show’s hosts test the validity of rumors,

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Liars and Figures

My dad had a favorite expression –

“Figures sometimes lie and liars sometimes figure.”

The truth of this expression was reinforced last week when U.S. Congressman Jason Chaffetz used a graph in a hearing on Planned Parenthood funding. This graph was prepared by the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life.

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Trust, Transparency & Truthfulness

In discussions of ethics, we often focus on rules. We analyze codes of ethics and we evaluate our legal obligations. Yet, ethical conduct incorporates three values that we intrinsically understand yet often have difficulty defining – trust, transparency and truthfulness.

First, truthfulness. We don’t want others to lie to us.

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Metrics Manipulation

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has been in the news for the long wait times before veterans are able to receive medical care.

The Electronic Wait List is one of the metrics used for evaluating performance within the VA hospital system. Based on news reports, it appears that the wait time that triggered listing on the Electronic Wait List was lengthened from 30 days to 120 days.

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Truth in Advertising: It applies to EHS professionals too.

When I opened my internet browser to post my previous newsletter, Our Need for Media Literacy, the article that popped up was “What to do when companies deceive you.”

This article outlines how three companies with very different products – a running shoe,

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