• Blog
  • Embrace the Suck

    Enough time has passed that I can share this story. I just filled the last page of a journal and started a new one. As is my custom, I read through the complete journal before starting fresh with the new one. I had scribbled down snippets of so many forgettable dreams, mundane details of some […]

  • Family
  • Wolves

    I have been known to offer the following explanation for my quirks: “I was raised by wolves.” I am not sure if Dear Sister (DS) also uses this shorthand language. But I know she will back me on everything here. Daddy Wolf raised his daughters to be fierce. The lesson took better with me than […]

  • Teaching
  • Crossed Wires

    The curtain is closing on the spring semester of my twenty-seventh year of teaching. Twenty-seven years is an entire generation. My first students, Fuqua MBAs in the Class of 2000, were my age.* My current students, Colorado undergrads in the class of 2027, are 36 years younger. People ask me, “is this generation of students […]

  • Job Search
  • From the Archive: Wrong Number

    In November 2004, I was at a conference in Boston. I brought the family with me. I was looking for a job because I wasn’t going to get tenure at Duke. I had set up some interviews. The phone rang in the hotel room: “Dr. Kornish?”Me: “Yes.”Voice: “This is H… L… [I didn’t catch his […]

  • Blog
  • Reasons

    In a discussion with my class last semester, I shared with my students that I don’t believe that “everything happens for a reason.” I understand that many people DO believe it, but I do not. A student followed up with me: why? I took her question as an invitation to dissect that belief, or unbelief, […]

  • Blog
  • Unbouncing

    Excerpts from Chapter 7 of A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner, “In Which Tigger is Unbounced,” or, as I like to think of it right now, an allegory for the modern workplace. [Rabbit:] “Tigger’s getting so Bouncy nowadays that it’s time we taught him a lesson. Don’t you think so, Piglet?”Piglet said that Tigger […]