Insights

Do you know why Hispanic Heritage Month starts in the middle of the month on Sept. 15? It’s when Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica celebrate their national independence days. The date is also close to independence anniversaries for Mexico, Chile and Belize. The timing offers a hint as to why Hispanic Heritage Month’s name is controversial — the term “Hispanic” has a complicated history, and opinions...

Keeping employees engaged and boosting morale was a challenge for law firms and legal organizations during the pandemic. But not for Northern District of Illinois Chief Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, who oversees Chicago and Rockford federal court workers. The chief judge was less than a year into her role when the pandemic hit. She started sending daily emails to staff about workplace infections in the courthouse. Initially, Judge Pallmeyer’s goal was to keep staff informed about what was...

By Dan Heath So often, in both our work and our personal lives, we get trapped in reaction mode. We address emergencies as they come up, but we don’t dedicate the time and attention to examining the broken systems that cause the emergencies. In other words, we wait for problems to find us downstream instead of going upstream to understand where those problems came from. For example, in 2012 an executive at the travel website Expedia realized that after booking a trip,...

By Steven Johnson How do good ideas happen, and what can we do to help people have more of them? Steven Johnson examines how the innovations that changed the world actually happened, and reveals the pattern of behavior that often underlies them in his book “Where Good Ideas Come From”:

1. The Adjacent Possible: “Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands...