Category Archives: Authors I-Q

ADR Authors by last name I-Q

Authors I-Q, Generational

Footprints In Time: Generation Reflections – by Martin Kimeldorf

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As my parents exited middle age, they began receiving flyers and seeing ads about retirement living communities. It was as if they had entered a momentary pause in their lifeline. My father, Don, began talking with my mother about the items they should keep and things to get rid of. Then one day my mom, Fay, showed up with a brown paper bag of books by Dr. Spock on child raising. 

After her first vodka gimlet, she told me she was giving me the bag of books she had been saving for me. Then after her second vodka cocktail, she confessed she just couldn’t part with them. 

There was a pause. It was awfully long. We averted our eyes and scanned the room.

Then she quipped, “This was silly. I should be going.” Without comment, she rose and headed for the door. My wife and I were struck mute and motionless. Then my mom got up and wordlessly left. It was so unlike Fay.

I had been having this dream for several days as winter drew to a close in 2023. It turned out this early morning would be the last night I dreamt this story…It has now reached its conclusion…and so I write. 

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Authors I-Q, Race & Ethnicity

The Audacity of Baby Steps and Hope! (Part 2) – by Leslie Nelson

“I take two steps forward, I take two steps back…”

The first line of those lyrics to the 1989 hit song, “Opposites Attract,” composed by Oliver Leiber and sung by Paula Abdul, swirled in my head as I thought about how to pick up from part one of this article series. If I apply those lyrics to matters of race, lack of racial progress in particular, what baby steps come to mind and what do two (or more) steps back look like?

Now for those of you that read it, Part 1 was about Phyllis and Eugene Unterschuetz’ RV journey across the nation, leading discussions about racial healing. That work culminated in their book, “Longing Stories in Racial Healing,” which they talked about during the November meeting of the 26 Tiny Paint Brushes writers’ guild. I ended part one with this challenge and question – “What should we, as individuals, consider doing next to further racial progress?” 

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Advisors, Authors I-Q, Trends 2023

Dialogue to counteract hate – by Simma Lieberman

I’m Jewish. My first personal memory of antisemitism was when I was eight years old. I was in the synagogue with my father on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, a day of fasting, praying, and atonement.

We were engaged in silent prayer when all that silence was broken by loud yelling and banging as the door crashed in. A group of young white Christian boys were attacking us. They threw things at us and called us names like “sheeny” and ‘kike.” “Go back to your country. You don’t belong here,” they screamed.

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Advisors, Advisors, Authors I-Q, Teams & Leaders

DEI: What’s Old Is New Again – by Susan McCuistion

The last few years seem to have been challenging for many people, myself included. Last year, I had the privilege to take a bit of a sabbatical. Even though I found it difficult to fully pull myself away from my work, I was removed enough that when Deborah Levine, Editor in Chief for this publication, asked the Advisory Council members to write on upcoming trends, I felt a little out of touch. I decided I needed to catch up a bit, and I started my research. Much to my dismay, I felt like the more things changed, the more they remained the same. I wasn’t seeing much different than what colleagues and I talked about over 20 years ago. People were still focused on hiring and attraction and leadership development. Some spoke of developing business cases and strategies around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)—or whatever form it’s currently taking.

Frankly, I had hoped we had a lot of this figured out by now.

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Advisors, Authors I-Q, Trends 2023

Living in an Axial Age – by John T. Pawlikowski, OSM, Ph.D

Prominent religious thinkers and activists such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry have defined humanity in recent decades as living in an axial age. In simple terms, an axial period is one in which there are major mutations of our social fabric regarding consciousness and social structures.

I believe we today remain living in an axial period announced by the likes of de Chardin and Berry. Living in such an age that occurs every few hundred years in history is both challenging and uncertain. We cannot easily predict the eventual outcome of the transformative process. The significant changes that are likely to occur may move civilization in directions that are productive and fundamentally enriching for all created life forms or, on the contrary, they may enhance the further deterioration of our social fabric and sustainability foundations. People will come to know and experience the final verdict when the current axial age reaches its conclusion. The new age that dawns will retain some forms of previous creational existence. But the new existence will undergo significant, even radical redefinition. 

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Advisors, Authors I-Q, Teams & Leaders, Trends 2023

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Trends: 2023 – by Soumaya Khalifa

Whether you traveled or stayed home this past holiday season, you paid attention to the news about Southwest Airlines’ struggles to get  people where they wanted to go.  Bad (really bad) weather, canceled flights, long lines, lost luggage, and exhausted and cranky passengers and airline staff all led to an operational disaster that will take Southwest a while to overcome.  

In a statement on its website, Southwest called its own performance “unacceptable.”  Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said Southwest had not put adequate systems in place to manage operations during the storm. “The fact is: We weren’t prepared,” Murray said.

But some observers weren’t at all surprised: Southwest’s crisis was inevitable after years of prioritizing stock dividends and executive compensation over necessary investments, including improving its outdated IT and crew scheduling systems. Southwest’s own employees issued plenty of warnings about those.

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Advisors, Authors I-Q, Go Green, Trends 2023

Bridging the Choice Chasm – by Dr. Shalini Nag and Surya Guduru

A path to a sustainable future

As we get look ahead to 2023, sustainability takes center stage, yet again. Can we really achieve a sustainable future? Today, we posit that we can, if we are able to apply the equity and inclusion lens to the problem and bridge the Choice Chasm – the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the haves and the have-nots, between developed and developing nations, between incumbent practices and emerging norms.

Aftershocks from the Covid19 pandemic exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, combined with climate chaos made 2022 a chronicle of global challenges. These include the intermittent resurgence of Covid variants, the mental health epidemic, continued supply chain disruptions, internal displacement in Ukraine, worsening food crisis in the world’s most vulnerable regions, and a global energy crisis. By October 2022, weather disasters alone cost nearly 20,000 lives and 30 billion dollars, refocusing governments and organizations alike on sustainability. 

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Authors I-Q, Books

The Audacity of Baby Steps and Hope! (Part 1) – by Leslie Nelson

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“What are the typical saboteurs of genuine efforts to have cross-racial dialogues about race?”

That was the opening question posed to Phyllis and Eugene Unterschuetz, co-authors of Longing Stories in Racial Healing.  They were invited by Terry Howard, co-founder of Douglasville’s 26 Tiny Paint Brushes Writers’ Guild, to speak at our Nov. guild meeting. 

The book is a memoir of the White couple’s immersive journey across the nation exploring the deep, murky, irritable waters of racism. Their mission was to have a candid and honest conversation about racism in a room mostly filled with people of color.

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Academic Articles, Authors I-Q, Social Issues

Antisemitic Rhetoric on Chattanooga Campus – by Rabbi Craig Lewis

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Of all the times to learn that about antisemitic literature circulating in my city, the news reached me during the intermission of “Fiddler on the Roof.” It is a great show that captures a moment in time, combining the folklore of Sholom Aleichem, the imagery of Marc Chagall, and great music by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick to tell a story from the collective Jewish memory. As with true Jewish history, it includes the good and the bad parts of being Jewish. We love “Tradition,” but much of our tradition has been built under the weight of oppression. “Fiddler” does not ignore this as the Russian constable’s promise of a pogrom, a violent attack against Jewish communities, mostly in the Russian Empire. Like Chekov’s gun, the mention of a pogrom comes to fruition and disrupts the joyous wedding scene. Being that this is still musical comedy, the pogrom is sanitized: a few goose pillows are torn up, a table flipped over, and one wedding guest is beaten. There is just enough to suggest what really would have happened.

An informed viewer of the show knows it more likely looked like the description from Chayim Nachman Bialik’s poem, “The City of Slaughter,” written about the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev. Here are a few excerpts:

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Authors I-Q, Race & Ethnicity, UTC Interns

A Thanksgiving to Remember – by Shayne Perry

A young boy, sat at a table full of people he didn’t know. A large family, all helping to make their thanksgiving dinner. Smells and laughter waft through the house. No television to distract from the face-to-face interaction. All the food is scratch made. The kitchen is littered with bits and pieces of dishes and ingredients, a messy labor of love. The smiles and plate passing keep the energy up. The boy is confused, there is no turkey, but a large plate of chitlins, and a ham. There aren’t any scalloped potatoes, but collard greens. As much as Thanksgiving is a universal experience, it differs house to house, culture to culture. This is a short story about how he came to know his neighbors.

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