Margaret Mead argued for keeping Santa as myth, not deception—preserving wonder while nurturing critical thinking. Treating Santa as symbolic and drawing on diverse traditions fosters imagination, honesty, and cultural insight.
The first in a series on learning from history and its value for organisational decision-making. Today, those who draw lessons from the past risk being labelled “on the wrong side of history,” much as dissenters in business face exile for challenging dominant narratives.
Providing more structure, not less, in both the daily tasks of employees and their perceptions about career pathways, offers the strongest viable path to improved staff retention and higher team performance.
Given the obvious dichotomy in this approach to work generations, the practical implications for management are that the leadership theories many have encountered will struggle to provide solutions when it comes to developing coherent teams.
The hope is much, for having gotten this far is to be forewarned and thus forearmed. In that we do well to employ scepticism when listening to a human interlocutor. Because even the best of us are filling in the blanks in our memory.
While I am not keen on the idea of self-policing, lest we go the way of some American states, I do wonder if society may not be better able to protect its citizens if its citizens were more involved in that self-same protection. Be it physical, intellectual or cyber.
The moment when left leaning popular culture overreached itself and instead of fascist shaming a once obscure academic into silence, brought back into popular use what had long been taboo and empowered the very thing they thought they were destroying.
I came across a stone bench that appeared to be very old. Carved into an ancient looking wall, dappled in moss, thick creepers wound across its surface.
