sports

Activism: It’s Not Just for Labour Day

It’s Labour Day weekend, and as many of my colleagues ruefully note, this is the one time every year when labour and union issues are guaranteed to get some attention in the news. And it’s usually mentioned in this news coverage that unions’ activism doesn’t just benefit their own members, but also improves society at large. When I teach industrial relations, I always talk about how workplaces don’t have things like minimum wages and regulated working hours because employers woke up one morning and voluntarily decided to give these things to their employees. Those things are required by law – and while unions were among the activists fighting to get those laws passed, the unions wanted better working conditions not just for their own members, but for everyone.

I’ve been thinking about this kind of activism in a very roundabout way recently, because of (more…)

Why It’s Good to Be Bad at Something

A lot of writing about success and achievement encourages you to find your “passion” (a word that is getting extremely overused) or to set a goal, and then to single-mindedly work as hard as you can to achieve as much as possible. I’m going to propose an alternate strategy for improvement: do something you’re terrible at. (more…)

Hooray! The 10th Anniversary of Canada’s Adult Figure Skating Championships

This weekend, the 10th annual Canadian adult figure skating championships are taking place, in Kamloops, BC. It’s a historic occasion for adult skaters in Canada, and since (sadly) I can’t be there, I’m instead going to write about why this anniversary is so important.

As explained on this blog’s About page, I am an adult skater. (more…)

Another Critique of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule”

I’m currently reading a very interesting book entitled Selling the Dream: How Hockey Parents and Their Kids are Paying the Price for Our National Obsession. (The “our” is Canada, if you hadn’t already guessed that from the reference to hockey.) If nothing else, this book has made me, as a figure skater, realize that participating in hockey can be almost as expensive as participating in figure skating, especially when parents put their kids into all kinds of additional hockey training and coaching.

However, the part of the book that I found particularly fascinating was its comments on Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hour rule”, which I have criticized in another post.  (more…)

Late-August Industrial Relations News

Lately I haven’t posted a lot of news from the world of Canadian industrial relations – but suddenly, at the end of the summer, all sorts of things are happening. (more…)

This Week in Communication: The Organizational Control Edition

It’s been a busy week for organizations trying to control how people communicate, but an interesting one if you’re intrigued by issues of how social and electronic media are, or should be, used. (more…)

Thinking about Success: A Perspective from Skating

It’s been my pleasure over the last couple of months to transcribe interview highlights for the Manleywoman Skatecast, a free podcast created by my fellow adult skater Allison Manley. Allison undertook this venture five years ago out of frustration with “fluffy” coverage of figure skating that focused on “what Johnny Weir ate last week, or what shoes Michelle Kwan is wearing”. To date Allison has interviewed more than 50 people associated with figure skating – and, proudly, has done so only with funding from listener donations. (more…)