Last week I urged organizational leaders to complete their roundtables. I was dangling a carrot. There is another way to motivate – the stick. Here’s a stick, what an incomplete roundtable looks like. That’s what happened to King Arthur’s Round table.

“Come in. I’ve been expecting you.” Merlin’s first meeting with young Arthur explains why he would one day be indispensable to King Arthur’s Roundtable. I wrote last week how businesses benefit from having a complete roundtable. Every organization does. Here’s why.

“… in my heart I know I’m funny.” Unfortunately, Lt. Steven Hauk was not funny. He’s clueless in Good Morning Vietnam. It’s a limitation of the left hemisphere, explaining the inability to get a joke. But it also explains the inability to craft an effective metaphor.

While the invention of the printing press did a lot of good, we often fail to recognize what it undid. Fleet Foxes might. “Helplessness Blues” captures one consequence of the printing press – a tenfold increase in unipolar depression in the Western nations.

“For some reason I can’t explain, I know Saint Peter won’t call my name.” Coldplay’s Chris Martin feels like he’s “not on the list.” The lyrics of “Viva la Vida” spell this out. It’s often an unsettling feeling, but there is an upside to being on the outside.

With summer winding down, it’s worth asking why America leads the world in unused vacation days – about 429 million per year. The answer might lie in half of your brain not playing seesaw.

This year, almost 22 million college students will be indoctrinated in the incontestable virtues of inclusion and diversity. Problem is, most educational institutions aren’t inclusive. In fact, they’re just the opposite.

Judo emphasizes winning by leveraging an opponent’s weight and strength. Japanese for “the gentle way,” you exert less energy while your opponent expends most of theirs. Learning a little judo might be the way to go in the religion and science debate.

Winston Churchill said democracy is the worst governing system – except for all the others. Capitalism is the most moral of a bad lot of economic systems, but only when bound to conscience. Together, conscience and capitalism steer a middle course.

James Madison wrote that when a nation follows the “dictates of conscience,” a free people remain free. What then happens when conscience, a social guardrail for such things as capitalism, dissolves?